The FOIA request was probably not denied because the FCC lacks the technical abilities to fulfill the request. In my experience it's likely that no technical pe

The FOIA request was probably not denied because the FCC lacks the technical abilities to fulfill the request. In my experience it's likely that no technical people were consulted on it. A FOIA office simply looks for any excuse they can use to deny a request if they want to deny it. The reason doesn't need to make sense or be their true reason. Here's an example from my own experience: I can recall a FOIA request I made for the results of searches in an internal government database in spreadsheet format. To my knowledge this can be exported using existing functionality in the web interface for the internal database. The request was denied, and I appealed. They claimed that the information was publicly available, which is absurd. In the appeal I showed that actually almost none of what I wanted was publicly available and the independent appeals office agreed (after a long delay). Then it became clear that the FOIA office thought the request would be burdensome and they tried to deny it on those grounds. I insisted that no, it wouldn't be burdensome. When it finally went to the person who would actually do the work, apparently it took only a few hours to do, and they declined to charge me anything for it. I assume the majority of that time was writing some useful comments in the headers of the spreadsheets. They didn't need to write the comments, so clearly they weren't pressed for time. In the end, the FOIA office spent far more time trying to deny this request than it would have taken to fulfill it.