STATEMENT OF 
ACTING CHAIRMAN MICHAEL J. COPPS
Re:  Assessment and Collection of Regulatory Fees for Fiscal Year 2009, MD Docket No. 09-
65, Assessment and Collection of Regulatory Fees for Fiscal Year 2008, MD Docket No. 
08-65
This item begins the process of assessing regulatory fees for this fiscal year (FY 2009) 
pursuant to Section 9 of the Communications Act. Section 9 requires that the Commission collect 
fees each year to recover the regulatory costs that are associated with its enforcement, policy and 
rulemaking, user information, and international activities.
I am particularly pleased that the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking includes the new 
methodology for calculating regulatory fees for submarine cable operators finally adopted by the 
Commission in March. Implementing this new methodology, however, is only a precursor of our 
completion of a long overdue, comprehensive review of the Commission’s regulatory fee 
framework, a project that my colleague Jonathan Adelstein and I have been pushing for years and 
that was finally launched by the Commission last August. As I have said before, it is hard to 
believe that we are still generally assessing fees based on the communications marketplace as it 
existed in 1994. To be frank, we are not yet able to say what a modernized fee structure will look 
like.  But I do intend to press the Commission for action on this before we issue next year’s 
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for FY 2010. I look forward to working with my fellow 
Commissioners and interested stakeholders to update our rules to accurately and equitably reflect 
today’s regulatory practices.