Clothed in the benign sounding name of “net neutrality,” the Federal Communications Commission met on December 21 to issue new Internet regulations that will decidedly “de-neutralize” internet management and put into the hands of political appointees the power to restrict free speech. This comes despite smack-downs by a federal appeals court in April in the FCC's first effort to enforce “net neutrality” rules and by the US Congress, which warned the agency that it was overstepping its authority. Then, to make sure the boneheads running the FCC had read their lips, 300 members of Congress recently sent a letter to them opposing Internet regulation.
So, what does all of this say of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school chum of Barack Obama, and the other two Democrats on the five-member Commission? It says they are going to do pretty much what they want – the Constitution be damned! What a surprise after the hose job the Democrats gave the American public with ObamaCare and its unconstitutional requirement to force the citizens of a free country to buy a product or face punishment. But that’s a subject for another blog.
The statements of each FCC commissioner are posted on the agency’s web site.
Robert McDowell, one of the two Republican members, said this in his dissenting statement:
“Using these new rules as a weapon, politically favored companies will be able to pressure three political appointees to regulate their rivals to gain competitive advantages. Litigation will supplant innovation. Instead of investing in tomorrow’s technologies, precious capital will be diverted to pay lawyers’ fees. The era of Internet regulatory arbitrage has dawned.”
Meredith Baker, the other Republican member, said this in her statement:
“[This] is not a consumer-driven or engineering-focused decision. It is not motivated by a tangible competitive harm or market failure. The majority bypasses a market power analysis altogether, and acts on speculative harms alone. The majority is unable to identify a single ongoing practice of a single broadband provider that it finds problematic upon which to base this action. In the end, the Internet will be no more open tomorrow than it is today.”
Obama, a longtime advocate of “net neutrality,” is getting his way on Internet regulation through Genachowski, who has worked so closely under White House guidance that visitor logs show he met with Obama at least 11 times there.
Obama said the FCC's action will "help preserve the free and open nature of the Internet." But in a speech to graduates at Hampton University in Virginia, Obama complained that too much information is a threat to democracy. "With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a means of emancipation," he whined. "All of this is not only putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy."
Really? Information is a threat to democracy? You’ll recall that early this year during the healthcare debate Obama said we should turn off cable news. Too much information. Later, he dissed Fox News as the mouthpiece of the Republican Party, characterized the network as little more than talk radio, and urged other news organizations not to treat Fox News as a legitimate news station.
When her husband was embroiled in the Lewinski sex scandal, Hillary said “We are all going to have to rethink how we deal with [an uncensored Internet], because there are all these competing values … Without any kind of editing function or gate keeping function …” But then she recently criticized China for its Internet censorship.
If there’s one thing that gives politicians of all stripes a bad case of heartburn, it’s a free and independent source of information. The Internet is a digital town hall, the paragon of free speech, where people can say whatever they want without the interference or permission of government. That is what has made it Political Enemy No. 1. The former gatekeepers of information – the mainstream media and the federal government – find Internet access to information a pain in the derrière and will do whatever they can get away with to regulate it.
Hey, I freely admit there’s a lot of nonsense on the Internet because anyone who wants to go to the trouble can write anything and post it online. Some would point to this blog as evidence of that. But there’s also a lot of valuable information on the Internet – the kind that used to take hours, if not days, to scrounge up in the prehistoric days of Dewey Decimal System-based libraries – which I can now find in minutes.
So what’s broken on the Internet that requires “net neutrality” and the FCC to fix? The FCC claims the new rules will prevent potential future harms and they could shape how Americans access and use the Internet years from now. But ISPs and web sites currently do a pretty good job of regulating Internet traffic, I think. There's no evidence the public is demanding new rules to protect them from ISP, cable company, and telephone network abuses, as the FCC alleges could happen (but hasn’t). In fact, since the FCC announcement of new rules, a Rasmussen national telephone survey found that only 21% of “Likely U.S. Voters” want the FCC to regulate the Internet as it does radio and television. Fifty-four percent are opposed to such regulation.
Unelected bureaucrats at the FCC were the same troglodytes that forced everyone to buy clunky Ma Bell telephones and protected the company from innovative competitors for decades. This same FCC imposed un-free speech diversity using its "fairness doctrine" club against conservative talk radio. These same technology trolls took 20 years to approve cellular systems for market and embraced cable and satellite innovations with the same glacial zeal. This is who wants to manage the Internet?
Despite Al Gore’s fatuous claim to have taken the initiative in creating the Internet, heterogeneous and diversified interests of the private sector that truly did create it have done quite well without the help or oversight of government, thank you very much. Pingdom, an Internet monitoring firm, estimates that 1.7 billion worldwide users sent an average of 247 billion e-mails a day in 2009. On Cyber Monday, November 29, Americans racked up more than $1 billion in online sales. Without government subsidies or federal specifications to guide them, Google invested its own resources to develop the Ngram Viewer, released on the 17th of this month, which puts the contents of 5,195,769 books spanning five centuries on the Internet in a searchable database. It was private capital that changed the way the world communicates using the Internet. The USPS now works less and costs more than ever. It was private capital and a non-government Internet that destroyed the barriers to information sharing, expanded the frontiers of knowledge, created new forms of entertainment and commerce, and generated trillions of dollars in wealth.
Would an FCC-managed Internet have accomplished any of this? No. A bottom-up unregulated and under-taxed market (you and me) made it possible for free speech, innovation, and competition to thrive on the Internet at affordable prices. The Internet portends an ideological, not a commercial, problem for government.
"Net neutrality" would essentially strip the control and traffic management of broadband networks from those companies that deployed them and make them run properly, and transfer much of that oversight to clueless but meddling online traffic cops. The FCC commissioners will write incomprehensible rules governing ISPs, bandwidth use, content, prices, and disclosure requirements on Internet speeds.
FCC Chairman Genachowski claims “net neutrality” is designed only to prevent the non-problem of big bad cable and phone companies from blocking some web sites while favoring others, particularly their own, with higher speed and better quality. Yet somehow the Internet has managed thus far to succeed on its own, and bloggers have no complaints about getting their voices heard and providing forums for unfettered free expression.
Currently, broadband is defined as an information service, which means it doesn't suffer much FCC oversight. That’s the problem. Genachowski's plan is to shift broadband into the same classification as telephone service, so broadband can enjoy more oversight by the agency. It would also bring broadband and Internet services under rules that were developed for the rotary phone in the 1930s. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, whose dissent is excerpted above, said that the rules for telephone services aren't appropriate for Internet service providers:
“The commission is seeking to impose 19th-century-style regulations designed for monopolies on competitive, dynamic and complex 21st-century Internet technologies.”
The FCC says it would not subject Internet service providers to the full brunt of regulation that would come with the new classification, instead choosing a "third way" that would apply only some of the rules. Yeah, sure. Like TSA’s grope and stare screening for terrorists.
What the FCC is attempting is complicated, irrelevant, and an unvarnished power grab. As I’ve said above, the Internet poses an ideological threat, not a commercial one, to government. The alleged potential for commercial abuse by big cable and telephone providers exists only in the ideological imaginations of the three liberal FCC commissioners and their godfather in the White House. The claim that regulatory power is needed to ensure that consumers enjoy an "open Internet" is facetious. With the growing number of broadband providers is there a problem with “openness” on the Internet? Of course not! At the end of the day, the new “net neutrality” rules give government political appointees the authority to dictate how ISPs must handle the traffic that flows over ISP infrastructure. What’s “fair” or “open” about that?
But the FCC has before and can again censor speech. (Remember the “fairness doctrine”?) And when the FCC can regulate ISPs, they will be more compliant and interested in making censors happy. Remember also that the FCC protected Ma Bell from innovative competitors for decades. They can now quash the nascent Internet video industry with regulations if Netflix, Apple TV, and Hulu.com start stealing customers from complaining cable and pay TV services. Streaming video already consumes 20% of peak broadband traffic in this country, and one of the FCC rules deals with different pricing structures for different services instead of fixed prices.
I don’t have space in this blog post to write about the ideological foundations of the “net neutrality” movement and its acolytes. Maybe that’s something I’ll do next week. Its leftist tilt and funding come from billionaire George Soros and other left-wing think tanks and non-profits. It parades its radical, speech-censoring agenda as a crusade for “media justice.” If social justice thrives on the redistribution of wealth and economic rights, media justice thrives on the redistribution of speech and First Amendment rights.
The convocations of the universal broadband disciples are marked with Marxist-tinged rants about “disenfranchisement” and “empowerment.” Broadband access is a new “civil right.” Therefore, high speed access must be made available to all Americans. Democrat handwringers bemoan the concentration of corporate media power. Not surprisingly, the “net neutrality” crowd considers its enemies to be conservatives on talk radio, cable TV, and on the web who have exposed their schemes. Conservatives are hate speech purveyors who must be managed, if not censored, in the brave new media world of “net neutrality.” The Media Justice Fund, which is funded by the Ford Foundation, is a major lobby for universal broadband, and describes the movement as “grounded in the belief that social and economic justice will not be realized without the equitable redistribution and control of media and communication technologies.” In other words, down with media capitalism.
The “net neutrality” rhetoric is almost theological. These new FCC rulings should alarm anyone who believes safeguards are needed to protect First Amendment rights – most particularly from government abuse. If I were Julius Genachowski, I’d hold up on the regulation writing just now. A new Republican House convenes in a couple of weeks. It will control the FCC purse strings – and their regulatory power.
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