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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Maybe you remember when Obamacare was rolled out. People who needed to pick health insurance would log onto the healthcare.gov web site. They’re enter some personal information, and would see the choices and prices of health insurance that was available in your area.
You may also remember it was the website that couldn’t. Healthcare.gov was typically overloaded. People couldn’t log in. It showed the wrong choices, or no choices. In a world where thousands of new websites are launched each day, our government was incapable. It took months to get the website to work.
I was glad that I don’t get my health insurance through healthcare.gov.
There’s another government website that I do have to use several times a year. It’s the Federal Communications Commission’s web site. Radio and TV stations have to upload reports to the FCC’s website, usually once each quarter. There are about 16,000 broadcast licensees that have to log into the FCC.gov website and post their reports. Now that’s a tiny amount of traffic compared to the millions who use a government website for healthcare – and yet the FCC’s site can’t handle this very light level of usage.
On the filing date – which happens to be today – the login page is either very slow in loading, or won’t load at all. Since it’s the first quarter of a new year, broadcast licensees need to create new folders for 2025. That part of the web site usually fails. Then we upload our files. Often we are kicked out during the uploading process.
The FCC gives no leniency for broadcasters who miss the filing deadline. If FCC.gov won’t let you before the April 10 deadline, you’ll be fined on April 11th.
In older times, FCC files were kept in each radio and TV station’s offices. You had to show up in-person if you wanted to inspect them. Now all of that information is available online. That makes sense in today’s electronic age.
But I know that government is largely incompetent for the most basic things. Smart broadcasters know to upload their FCC reports a day or two in advance. Why can’t our government design things that work?
Chris Conley
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