Section 10 Forbearance: Asking the Right Questions to Get the Right Answers

Abstract

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 aimed to “provide for a pro-competitive, de-regulatory national policy framework designed to accelerate rapidly private sector deployment of advanced telecommunications and information technologies and services to all Americans….” Key to the Federal Communication Commission’s ability to satisfy this deregulatory mandate is Section 10 of the Act which, for the first time, provides the agency with the express legal authority to forbear from enforcing various portions of the Communications Act. The Commission has been of two-minds in its use of Section 10 forbearance to dismantle what is left of the Act’s highly-regulatory unbundling regime. In this Paper, we use the agency’s Phoenix Forbearance Order as a template for outlining how the agency can improve its forbearance analysis for the unbundling provisions in the 1996 Act, as well as for other residual regulatory obligations generally.

Keywords: Forbearance, Section 10

JEL Classification: K23, L51, L96. L98 038