In france, government officials are elite marques; in Japan, bureaucrat-gods. The best that America's downtrodden, beaten-up bureaucrats can wish for is probably quiet obscurity. That, broadly, used to be the state of affairs at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a government regulator whose extraordinary reach spans telecoms, cable TV, the media and, increasingly, big chunks of the rest of the tech industry. Then came 2000, the telecoms crash and sudden, hostile attention. Technogurus such as George Gilder, a popular newsletter writer, pronounced the FCC to blame for the trillions of dollars that vanished in the telecoms gold rush of the late 1990S. Congress, which had written the 1996 act upon which the FCC'S rule-making is based, ordered the regulator to fix the mess. So important was this task, wailed the pundits, that America's economic future was now, in effect, in the hands of incompetent bureaucrats.
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