Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Swordsdropper. On today's show, we're talking about the FCC and economics. Is the FCC an economics free zone? As a former economist, a Democrat, Tim Brennan, recently lamented about the FCC's work on net neutrality. Others have criticized the

agency for not engaging in enough economic analysis when making major decisions that impact

the economy. Joining me to discuss this is Hal Singer, a senior fellow at the GW Institute for

Public Policy, that's GWIP or GWip for short. Hal, thanks for joining the show.

Thanks for having me here, Adam.

And Hal recently joined us for a net neutrality event at GW, where we had a nice debate

over the future of the issue.

So we'll be sure to link to that in the show notes and be sure to check out that video.

It was pretty lively.

So Hal, you know, this is a hell of an accusation

to make about an agency that has a Bureau of Economics, that has economists working in it, and that

points to economic analysis in its rulemakings. So how dare you accuse the Honorable FCC

of being free of economics? Where do you draw this accusation from?

Well, you know, first, thanks for having me on again. You know, the quote, econ free, which is,

which is great because it fits conveniently in a hashtag, came from the former chief economist,

Tim Brenno, the FCC, who oversaw economic policy when the FCC was implementing its open Internet order.

So that's the genesis of the idea, but you know, if you start to dig into it, a lot of things point in the same direction.

For example, what we found is that the FCC has basically stopped doing economic analysis.

Now what's important to point out is

this should not be interpreted in any way as a dig on the economists who are there. In fact, in the paper,

we say that they likely have the best economists in this area. It's just that those economists

don't have any influence of the FCC. A few points. Number one is that, you know, they conducted

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