A newly-enpanled Federal Communications Commission wasted no time in getting busy on a bevy of important consumer issues at its first meeting on Thursday.

Apple has been taking a lot of heat lately – including from this blog – over its rejection of a nifty application called Google Voice for use on the iPhone. In the wake of the hubbub over Google Voice, some other iffy rejections of applications for the iPhone have been surfacing, in both the mainstream press and the blogosphere. In some ways these other rejections of apps by Apple are just as or more troubling than the Google Voice rebuff.

When Julius Genachowski took over as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in late June, one of his first official actions was to appoint FCC veteran Mary Beth Richards to oversee an ambitious overhaul of the agency. This week Richards talked about her goals and plans for accomplishing that task in an interview with Dow Jones News Service. We liked what she said.