Indecency public notice hits the Federal Register.
Earlier this month we reported on an odd public notice soliciting comments about the FCC’s indecency policy. That notice has now been published in the Federal Register – but that doesn’t mean that the notice makes any more sense now than it did when it first appeared.
The title of the notice still says that the FCC is seeking “comments on adopting egregious cases policy”, but that’s the only time the term “egregious cases policy” shows up. As a result, it’s far from clear exactly what we’re supposed to be commenting on. You would think that, if the FCC does have some “egregious cases policy” currently in effect – which is what the full text of the public notice released on April Fool’s Day indicated – the Commission might let us all in on the precise details of that policy so that we might be able to comment on it at least quasi-intelligently. Apparently not.
As we noted in our initial post, the utility of any record likely to be compiled in response to the notice’s nebulous invitation for comments is dubious. How, after all, is a commenter supposed to organize his/her/its comments in a coherent and useful way? And how can the Commission’s staff be expected to process those comments? Without any apparent context or direction, it’s hard to see what the staff can do with them.
If this is how the Commission proposes to deal with the indecency issue, that issue is likely to be with us, unresolved, for many years to come.
In any event, the Federal Register publication establishes the deadlines for comments in response to the notice. Comments are due by May 20, 2013, and reply comments by June 18.
