Most Speakers Support Move to Consolidated Licensing System
Speakers expressed general support for an FCC proposal to move to a Consolidated Licensing System (CLS), during a workshop Thursday. Mary Beth Richards, special counsel to the chairman for FCC Reform, said the commission will release a rulemaking notice on the CLS and plans additional workshops. “The CLS system is really an ambitious project,” Richards said. “It’s part of our overall reform efforts to make the agency more efficient and effective, easier to use our systems.”
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"We support electronic filing, the more the better,” said Christopher Bjornson, attorney at Steptoe & Johnson. “It should be the rule of limited exceptions rather than having exceptions sometimes swallow the rules. There’s still license filings and other filings that need to be incorporated electronically that are made by paper -- those should go away as much as possible.”
Bjornson said the FCC’s Universal Licensing System (ULS) and the International Bureau Electronic Filing System (IBFS) have seen the most upgrades. “Other filing systems haven’t yet gotten to the level and with the Consolidated Licensing System I would hope that you would … bring the other ones up to the level of excellence,” he said. “Upgrades can be costly, but nonetheless ultimately they should be undertaken because on the back end you have the public benefits and cost savings.” Bjornson, chairman of the FCBA’s Access to Government Committee, said in general the FCBA supports adoption of the CLS.
"I've been doing this long enough to remember when things were all submitted in paper form and when microfiche was the order of the day and nobody wants to go back to that, I know,” said Brian Higgins of Wilkinson Barker. “But all the systems that are online right now were designed probably about eight, nine, 10 years ago and they have not been fundamentally redesigned since then so they do reflect sort of their time and their age.” Higgins noted that ULS was designed to work with an older Internet browser and not Internet Explorer. “So things do change and these systems need to change as well.”
Developing a consolidated system is critical, Higgins said. “Anybody who has used ULS or the experimental licensing system or any of the other licensing systems used knows that they're completely different. They don’t look anything like each other and they behave differently, from how you get into the system, how you answer questions, how you upload attachments, how you do print previews, how you sign and certify and then how you find them after they're on file.”
But a few speakers raised objections. “I just disagree with a lot of what is being said here,” said Peter Tannenwald of Fletcher, Heald. “I think uniformity is overemphasized. The law is different in different areas. You need a construction permit to build broadcast station. You don’t need a construction permit to build a land-mobile station so you can’t have the same terminology for everyone.” Tannenwald said he used all the licensing systems and was most comfortable with the Broadcast Radio and Television Electronic Filing System (CDBS). That suggests other systems are better than “some people think” or “that people will prefer the system they work with most and say that’s the best one,” he said. Most problems occur when changes are made to any of the systems, Tannenwald added. “The longer something stays the same the more the licensees learn to work with it and understand it,” he said. “This is a bonanza for lawyers … and it will take five years to settle down.”