Astroturf Campaigns : Transparency in Telecom Merger Review

Large telecommunications companies looking to merge spend millions of dollars in their lobbying efforts to clear regulatory hurdles and get their proposed mergers approved. Corporations such as AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner use public participation processes as vehicles to influence regulatory decisionmaking. In the FCC merger review context, the notice and comment process as well as the use of public hearings have become a fertile breeding ground for hidden corporate influence. Corporations spend millions in the form of corporate social responsibility and call upon nonprofit organizations that are recipients of their largesse to represent their corporate interests as grassroots interests when the FCC seeks public comment. This “astroturfing” undermines what Congress intended to be a “well-reasoned agency deliberation process” and makes the FCC's notice-and-comment rulemaking process less democratically legitimate. This Note argues that the FCC should adopt a financial conflicts of interest disclosure rule for all comments that it receives, not just comments that include scientific or technological data. The integrity of values-based preferences is just as important as that of science-based preferences when the FCC is mandated to consider the effects on the public interest in making policy decisions