MMTC Comments on FCC Data Collection Practices

RADIO ONLINE | Tuesday, August 17, 2010 | 2:36pm CT

The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC) has filed comments with FCC in response to the Commission's three concurrent Public Notices released June 29 by the Media, Wireline Competition, and the Wireless Telecommunications Bureaus. In the comments, MMTC said Commission policy should be driven and supported by relevant and complete data sets.

As Chairman Genachowski recently declared at the MMTC Access to Capital and Telecommunications Policy Conference, "promoting equal opportunity, driving private sector investment, fostering an environment where new and emerging businesses can thrive... are vitally important to our nation's future. These goals cannot be achieved if the Commission fails to act and instead maintains its record of poor data collection in the areas of equal employment opportunity ("EEO"), media, telecom and broadband ownership, broadband deployment and broadband adoption."

The Commission's civil rights and social justice initiatives, many of which have been pending for years, cannot move forward unless the agency changes course, said MMTC. The agency needs reliable, transparent data that Commission staff, other government agencies, researchers, and advocates alike can use to shape policy to ensure greater opportunity for all.

Additionally, MMTC said the need for new methods for the Commission to secure relevant data cannot be understated. In recent years, the Commission has come under fire for not collecting, maintaining, or supplying clear and accurate data in a transparent manner. Private companies began to provide agencies such as the Commission with data and MMTC noted that this data is often gathered for the purpose of providing marketing and investment information, not for policy making, and often leaves out data on marginalized and commercially unattractive communities.