MORE ON MCCAIN from my comments section (yes, if you want to comment on one of my posts here, you can go do it at my blog):

I spent some forty years working under FCC regulation, and it’s clearly not unreasonable to ask for help in moving the commission along.

They have been better or worse depending on the chairman at the time, but there is an incredible tendency to simply not take action if there is a real decision to make.

This is compounded by the deterioration in the quality of commission staff, now totally dominated by lawyers, many of whom fail to have even a elementary grasp of the technology they are supposed to regulate, and the poor quality of recent political appointees to the commission. By ‘recent’ I mean the last twenty years; I would indict both the Bush and Clinton administrations.