I wish I could have made it to the recent Silicon Flatiron-sponsored conference, Reforming the Federal Communications Commission. The conference was also sponsored by Public Knowledge -- its president, Gigi Sohn, blogged about the conference here. Nothing in that post of recommendations coming out of the day reads to me as at all controversial.
There is also a website focused on FCC reform looking to continue this discussion at http://fcc-reform.org/ (and hey! the website runs on my favorite CMS - Drupal)
I work at the FCC -- and I am just as concerned as a citizen of this country about having an effective and open system of government that also utilizes all of the advances in technology of the last decade. I think anyone who works for or with an administrative agency of the U.S. government must feel at least some frustration with the gap between how participation works in practice and with how it could be if there was a commitment to modernize it and the laws and rules were changed to adapt to allow for the full use of current communications technologies.
I'll just repeat what I've written on this site before: all of this is just my opinion and does not reflect any official statement of the FCC or any of its officials.
I suppose saying or writing something like that is imprinted on your brain after awhile. Given this tendency to be cautious that is probably very common across the government, I hope there is a discussion about how and how much we want officials and staff of government agencies to be communicating with the public. It's much, much easier in most of life to communicate now -- but it requires adoption of technology and adaptation of organizational culture. Easy enough to do personally or in a small flexible organization; perhaps a bit harder to do in larger groups like... the U.S. government. There certainly is the possibility to have a more open and connected U.S. government -- I am as interested as anyone else in how we get there. (In fact, about four years ago I wrote a short note about then Chairman Michael Powell's brief interlude of blogging. I hope in the near future to see more reasons to write such notes about officials embracing modern tools of communications.)