Posts Tagged ‘net neutrality’
‘Net neutrality’ sounds nice, but the Web is working fine now. The new rules will inhibit investment, deter innovation and create a billable-hours bonanza for lawyers.
By ROBERT M. MCDOWELL
Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government’s reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling.
How did the FCC get here?
For years, proponents of so-called “net neutrality” have been calling for strong regulation of broadband “on-ramps” to the Internet, like those provided by your local cable or phone companies. Rules are needed, the argument goes, to ensure that the Internet remains open and free, and to discourage broadband providers from thwarting consumer demand. That sounds good if you say it fast.
Nothing is broken that needs fixing, however. The Internet has been open and freedom-enhancing since it was spun off from a government research project in the early 1990s. Its nature as a diffuse and dynamic global network of networks defies top-down authority. Ample laws to protect consumers already exist. Furthermore, the Obama Justice Department and the European Commission both decided this year that net-neutrality regulation was unnecessary and might deter investment in next-generation Internet technology and infrastructure.
Analysts and broadband companies of all sizes have told the FCC that new rules are likely to have the perverse effect of inhibiting capital investment, deterring innovation, raising operating costs, and ultimately increasing consumer prices. Others maintain that the new rules will kill jobs. By moving forward with Internet rules anyway, the FCC is not living up to its promise of being “data driven” in its pursuit of mandates—i.e., listening to the needs of the market.
It wasn’t long ago that bipartisan and international consensus centered on insulating the Internet from regulation. This policy was a bright hallmark of the Clinton administration, which oversaw the Internet’s privatization. Over time, however, the call for more Internet regulation became imbedded into a 2008 presidential campaign promise by then-Sen. Barack Obama. So here we are.
Last year, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski started to fulfill this promise by proposing rules using a legal theory from an earlier commission decision (from which I had dissented in 2008) that was under court review. So confident were they in their case, FCC lawyers told the federal court of appeals in Washington, D.C., that their theory gave the agency the authority to regulate broadband rates, even though Congress has never given the FCC the power to regulate the Internet. FCC leaders seemed caught off guard by the extent of the court’s April 6 rebuke of the commission’s regulatory overreach.
In May, the FCC leadership floated the idea of deeming complex and dynamic Internet services equivalent to old-fashioned monopoly phone services, thereby triggering price-and-terms regulations that originated in the 1880s. The announcement produced what has become a rare event in Washington: A large, bipartisan majority of Congress agreeing on something. More than 300 members of Congress, including 86 Democrats, contacted the FCC to implore it to stop pursuing Internet regulation and to defer to Capitol Hill.
Facing a powerful congressional backlash, the FCC temporarily changed tack and convened negotiations over the summer with a select group of industry representatives and proponents of Internet regulation. Curiously, the commission abruptly dissolved the talks after Google and Verizon, former Internet-policy rivals, announced their own side agreement for a legislative blueprint. Yes, the effort to reach consensus was derailed by . . . consensus.
After a long August silence, it appeared that the FCC would defer to Congress after all. Agency officials began working with House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman on a draft bill codifying network management rules. No Republican members endorsed the measure. Later, proponents abandoned the congressional effort to regulate the Net.
Still feeling quixotic pressure to fight an imaginary problem, the FCC leadership this fall pushed a small group of hand-picked industry players toward a “choice” between a bad option (broad regulation already struck down in April by the D.C. federal appeals court) or a worse option (phone monopoly-style regulation). Experiencing more coercion than consensus or compromise, a smaller industry group on Dec. 1 gave qualified support for the bad option. The FCC’s action will spark a billable-hours bonanza as lawyers litigate the meaning of “reasonable” network management for years to come. How’s that for regulatory certainty?
To date, the FCC hasn’t ruled out increasing its power further by using the phone monopoly laws, directly or indirectly regulating rates someday, or expanding its reach deeper into mobile broadband services. The most expansive regulatory regimes frequently started out modest and innocuous before incrementally growing into heavy-handed behemoths.
On this winter solstice, we will witness jaw-dropping interventionist chutzpah as the FCC bypasses branches of our government in the dogged pursuit of needless and harmful regulation. The darkest day of the year may end up marking the beginning of a long winter’s night for Internet freedom.
Mr. McDowell is a Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.
MUST . . . REGULATE . . . INTERNET!
Rebuked by the Justice Department, the courts, over 300 members of Congress and the heads of industry, Julius remains undeterred!
The decree has been made, for Julius shall rule his Internet by fiat!
ALL HAIL JULIUS, CAESAR OF THE INTERNET!
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand warned us that collectivist programs for government control would be couched in altruistic terms such as the “Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule” and the “Equalization of Opportunity Bill”, envisioning legislation that by their very names people would have to surmise must be in the everyone’s best interest.
So when the politicians devise bills “for the common good” with names such as the “Fairness Doctrine” or “Net Neutrality”, right of the bat, just in the very crafting of the names, you should have your alarm bells ringing loudly. And while government forced equal air time for what ever the government decrees as “Fairness” has been killed in its current incarnation, the evil little fascists behind “Net Neutrality” look to be on the verge of imposing government controls on the businesses which provide us our Internet access.
It’s ironic that on the very same day our own government is about to impose its control over our ISPs, we see this story coming out of Hugo Chavez’ totalitarian regime in Venezuela:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez defended plans for a law that would impose broadcast-type regulations on the Internet, saying Sunday that his government should protect citizens against online crimes.
Source: Fox News
From the news coming out of the Venezuelan dictatorship to the news from right here at home, the first line of the story is essentially the same:
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski defended plans for a law that would impose broadcast-type regulations on the Internet, saying Sunday that his government should protect citizens against Internet service providers.
If you’ve ever read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, at the turn of the last century, when businesses were left to their own devices, the state of the meat packing industry was absolutely horrific. In the wake of the public outcry over the conditions portrayed in Mr. Sinclair’s book, the government regulation that ensued was well needed, so you won’t get any argument from me that there’s never a time when the government needs to be involved in certain industries to ensure that cutting costs and maximizing profits doesn’t result in endangering the public.
When we’re speaking of government regulation, however, there’s a gargantuan difference between government regulation of something as cut and dried as, “is the food safe?” or “is the building safe?” and putting the Internet as we know it under government control. The FCC now seems poised to do just that in appointing themselves as the Overlords of the Internet.
When it comes to this impending government control of the Internet, the first thing you have to ask yourself is, why do people feel compelled for the government to come in and control the Internet when there’s nothing broken that needs to be fixed in the first place? Why this left-wing compulsion towards placing the government in charge of everything?
When speaking of business and government, many liberals will always see business as the greater of two evils or perhaps the one and only evil out of the two, but for my liberal friends with so much distrust for business and so much faith in government, do you not remember your left-wing pride in protesting an American government at war in Southeast Asia, holding the Nixon White House to account for the abuses of Watergate, or calling for an even more recent administration to stand charges for war crimes? This is the same government you would allow to place itself in charge of the Internet?
If you judge it from the perspective of history, it makes no sense at all to always place all your faith in governments over business. All you have to do is look at the last hundred years to see that for every food safety horror and BP oil spill in this world you can find horrors a million times greater, and I mean that literally – horrors a million times greater – that have been perpetrated by governments on humanity.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, Overlord of the Internet
It’s kind of scary to think that every single totalitarian government in the world has taken control of their people’s access to the Internet, and now our government plans to do the same. Even scarier to see our own government using the exact same rationale as the totalitarian governments, arguing that government control of the Internet is in “the public’s best interest”. Do you seriously doubt we could end up on the slippery slope to Chinese-style control of the Internet, simply becuase it’s OUR government? That OUR government is nothing like the government of the Chinese and how dare anyone question the noble motives of OUR benevolent leaders?
Perhaps it’s best we remind ourselves that this great nation of ours, this shining city upon a hill whose beacon of light guides freedom-loving people everywhere is also the very same country where our second president, John Adams, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, four laws which were used to impose fines and jail time on people critical of the Adams Administration. Completley unconstitutional and yet it was the law of the land until it expired at the end of Adam’s term.
Perhaps we should also remember that this is the same America where our most beloved president of all presidents, Abraham Licoln, closed newspapers and jailed editors who sympathized with the South.
We’d be well served to also recall that this is also the same America that was home to the authoritarian rule of President Woodrow Wilson and his Sedition Act of 1918 which forbade the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government. With a definition like that, you can nail pretty much anyone you want, can’t you?
Or for more recent history, simply look back on the 2008 campaign where we saw an American news media that was “90% in the tank for Barack Obama.” Those aren’t my words, by the way, those are the words of the former Chairman of the Democrat National Committee, Terry McAullife. The media was so head over heels in love that “the coverage of Barack Obama was embarrassing. It was an embarrassment.” Again, those aren’t my words, those are the words of former Democrat Governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, one of the greatest stalwarts of the entire Democrat party. So with 90% of the media in their back pocket, surely you’d think the Obama Administration would be nothing but thankful. Far from it – if you look at all the sniping, griping and complaining the Obama Administration has aimed at Fox News, you’ll see that for this administration, even one questioning voice is one voice too many.
So don’t ever imagine that things would be completely different here with OUR government in control of Internet vs. the reality of every other country where the government controls the Internet. Don’t think it’s laughable to suggest we could end up like China, that it couldn’t happen simply because… well, we’re Americans!
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that the governments of countries like Venezuela, Iran and China putting the clamps on their people’s use of the Internet is something totally different and that government control of the Internet could never end up like that in OUR country, because we’ve already seen the kind of authoritarian intolerance for public dissent from our own government many times in 230 short years of history.
Why even put our government in a position where it can be seduced by its own authoritarian temptations in the first place? It’s like driving a crack addict all around the neighborhood where he used to score and then dropping him off at the corner. Net Neutrality is a recipe for an Orwellian Nightmare, pure and simple, and we, as citizens, should do everything humanly possible to keep this great government of ours far, far away from the seductive idea of putting itself in control of the Internet.