Conference Agenda

This article examines how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) acquired, managed, and applied data across five major telecommunications infrastructure initiatives implemented between January 1996 and December 2025. Using a comparative case design that holds the implementing institution constant across five administrations, the study asks how FCC data practices shape movement from policy design to implementation. Two key findings emerged from this study. First, each case shows a design-to-implementation gap: identifiable decision points at which implementation choices modified, delayed, or departed from formal design, with outcomes ranging from full failure to successful launch or material but bounded divergence. Second, FCC data practices have repeatedly produced a fragmented, siloed information ecosystem marked by inconsistent definitions, non-interoperable systems, uncertain provider-reported inputs, and uneven coordination. This degrades the administrative visibility targeting, monitoring, and enforcement depend upon. Cross-case comparison indicates data fragmentation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for divergence: Organizational arrangements, not data quality alone, distinguished the single case that failed outright from the four that achieved full or partial convergence. National security recurred as a cross-cutting obligation in the cases (implicitly or explicitly) rather than a discrete policy stream. These findings suggest that closing the design-to-implementation gap in telecommunications policy requires attention to organizational structure alongside data infrastructure. This lays the groundwork for extending this single-agency analysis into the interagency landscape in which federal infrastructure policy actually operates.