This is the second installment in our series on the proposed Net Neutrality regulations. The introduction to Neutrality’s Reality is in the Arizona Daily Independent here.
“Thou shalt not question thine Leaders.” [I Barack 3:12]
After whipping four million commenters into a frenzy, the White House plied the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to produce and pass Net Neutrality regulation. The best available information claims that the Commission produced a whopping 325-page quagmire. And the Commission has yet to allow outside eyes to read its contents. While a mere candidate, Mr. Obama promised that his would be the most “open and transparent” administration ever to have served this country. In reality, his administration and the political machine backing him have established a pattern of needing to “pass it to see what is in it”. Drafting, and subsequently passing, such immense regulation without public scrutiny is certainly anything but transparent.
Speciously, the Commission has put forth a press release, an anemic five pages in comparison, extoling the wonders of the new regulation and the magical innovation it will spur. (You can peruse the document yourself at http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-strong-sustainable-rules-protect-open-internet.) Within the first sentences of the release, the astute reader begins to wonder who works in service of whom: The document castigates the Courts—as if the Judiciary should bend the law to the whim of the Executive—and vaguely praises the “overwhelming majority” of the obedient citizens who answered the President’s call for support.
Here are the first two excerpts from the press release, and the contrasting reality behind them:
“[T]he agency’s attempts to implement enforceable, sustainable rules to protect the Open Internet have been twice struck down by the courts. Today, the commission—once and for all—enacts strong, sustainable rules, grounded in multiple sources of legal authority, to ensure that Americans reap the economic, social, and civic benefits of an Open Internet today and into the future.”
Right away, the Commission insinuates that the courts (note the lowercase ‘c’) have prevented the FCC from carrying out the will of the people, and have stood in the way of an “Open Internet”.
This same statement sends the unequivocal message to the Judiciary that what the Executive says is law, and the Courts shall not meddle, lest the Executive override them.
As the paragraph drones on, the Commission promises to leverage any “legal authority” to enact economic, social, and civic change; from previous experience of and Constitutional challenges to this administration, we can fairly conclude that those “sources” of “legal authority” may be extra-Constitutional, incorrect, or simply imaginary.
In the same breath in which the Commission refers to the lowercase ‘c’ courts, it twice reverences the god of the uppercase Open Internet, as all politicized campaigning up to now has elevated this proper noun to a sacrosanct entity to be worshipped. Read into the wording and how each word is delivered; there is a wealth of knowledge to be gleaned from these details. We will see this several more times.
“America’s broadband networks must be fast, fair and open—principles shared by the overwhelming majority of the nearly 4 million commenters who participated in the FCC’s Open Internet proceeding.”
In the past two decades, our societal perception of the concept of an “overwhelming majority” has been perverted: By one estimate, the number of comments the FCC received against new regulation were in the 40% range, leaving between 50 and 60% of respondents, 0.62 to 0.75% of the overall population (that, at most, is three-quarters of one percent of U.S. citizens) constituting an “overwhelming majority”. This is ludicrous.
Contrary to the FCC’s attitude, internet speed does not come from regulation, has never come from regulation, and will never come from regulation. In fact, as we will explore in coming installments, deregulation spurred more innovation than regulation, by orders of magnitude.
Speed comes from innovation, not regulation, and the Judiciary is every bit as important as is the Executive and the Legislature. Tomorrow, we dig further into the release and examine more of the Commission’s strangely twisted versions of these facts.