WRF Partners Appointed to Prestigious Committee on Communications Policy Legislation

February 2, 2005

Wiley Rein & Fielding Partners Richard E. Wiley and Nancy J. Victory have been appointed to a Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) Advisory Committee tasked with drafting model communications policy legislation to contribute to Congress' anticipated consideration of a Communications Act rewrite.

The Foundation's Digital Age Communications Act Project joins policymakers from the last five presidential administrations to ensure deregulated competition in services and platforms now, while crafting language that can anticipate future technologies and services.

"PFF has assembled an impressive group of legal, policy and economic minds to develop a proposal for conducting this makeover and, in doing so, tackle some of the toughest, but most important issues, in telecommunications policy today," said Victory, a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

"The Digital Age Communications Act Project recognizes that technological advances and marketplace developments have outgrown our nation's telecommunications policy framework," said Victory. "Rather than serving as a foundation for growth and development, the Communications Act, last updated in 1996, is increasingly constraining innovation and full and fair competition."

The Advisory Committee will play an important role in ensuring the success of the project, whose substantive output will be a new model federal communications law, with supporting background reports, that seeks to move communications policy in a more market-oriented direction and bring it in line with the new marketplace and technological realities of the digital age.

The Progress & Freedom Foundation is a market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. It is a 501(c)(3) research & educational organization.