As Congress considers rewriting the Communications Act, the hardest question is not about broadband speeds or universal service. It is about institutional design: Who should make the rules for the digital economy? And should they evolve with markets or be fixed by them?

Those questions are intertwined. Keeping today’s regulatory framework largely intact implies a continued role for an expert agency such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). But a more fundamental shift—one that reduces government regulation of broadband services and rethinks broadcast licensing—would also call into question whether the FCC is still necessary. Perhaps whatever policies are needed should be overseen instead by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration?

This tension surfaced, if only briefly, at a March 26 hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. Former FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly suggested preserving the agency while steering it toward deregulation. Adam Thierer of the R Street Institute took a more sweeping view: If Congress truly embraces a lighter regulatory touch, it should write those limits directly into law—and consider whether an independent commission is needed at all.

The case for the FCC once seemed obvious. It was created largely to oversee monopoly telephone networks and manage scarce broadcast spectrum, insulating those decisions from day-to-day political pressure. That insulation mattered. Investors were more willing to fund large-scale communications infrastructure when they believed regulators would act predictably rather than opportunistically.

But the world that justified that structure has largely disappeared. Telecommunications markets are no longer defined by monopoly providers. Broadcasting spectrum is no longer the singular gateway to mass communication. Fiber, wireless, and satellite networks compete, and digital platforms distribute content without regard to the regulatory silos embedded in mid-20th-century law. The rationale for a powerful, independent commission has disappeared alongside those old silos.

Keeping the FCC anyway is not a neutral choice. Agencies, once created, tend to accumulate responsibilities and facilitate the formation of interest groups that benefit from regulation. Over time, that dynamic can tilt policy away from consumers and toward those best positioned to navigate—or influence—the regulatory process. It can also expand the government’s reach into areas such as speech, as recent controversies over broadcast licensing and online content have shown.

Yet eliminating or shrinking the FCC would not, by itself, solve the deeper problem. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 illustrates the risk of trying to legislate too precisely. Congress wrote detailed rules for industries that were already being transformed by digitization. Those rules quickly became outdated, even as they distorted markets.

That lesson is especially relevant today. The digital economy evolves faster than legislation or regulation can comfortably track. Businesses succeed by adapting quickly, revising strategies, and learning from uncertainty. Government institutions are far less agile. This is especially true given recent Supreme Court decisions limiting agencies’ authority to interpret ambiguous statutes. Regulators such as the FCC can no longer easily create regulations; they must wait on voters.

This leaves Congress with a difficult choice. One path is to attempt to anticipate the future with specific industry rules and empowered regulators. The other is to accept the uncertainty of an evolutionary approach, relying more heavily on decentralized choices of customers, companies, investors, and employees to guide the future.

The political system tends to favor the first approach. Voters reward political leaders who promise clear answers and immediate solutions. But in fast-moving technological environments, those answers often address yesterday’s problems, not tomorrow’s opportunities.

If the United States wants to remain a world leader in information technologies, it may need to embrace a different mindset—one that places greater trust in decentralized decision-making and is more cautious about expanding regulatory control. That shift would not eliminate the need for rules. But it would require focusing on rules that define boundaries rather than prescribe actions, and a willingness to rethink institutions built for a very different era.

Rewriting the Communications Act is not just an exercise in updating policy. It is a test of whether Congress can design institutions suited for a world defined by constant change.