This is the tenth installment in our series on the proposed Net Neutrality regulations. If you haven’t followed “Neutrality’s Reality” from the beginning, the introduction is in the Arizona Daily Independent at here.
“Place thine government before thy own self, for all shall benefit a little when none benefit a lot.” [I Barack 2:8]
The Commission continues to prop itself up using a law over eighty years old. The Commission bases its new authority over digital bits and bytes in law modeled after early postal practices. And yet, what meager, logical, common-sense moves the Commission might be able to make to the actual benefit of the internet, the Commission instead dismisses as “anachronistic”:
“Together Title II and Section 706 support clear rules of the road, … while not burdening broadband providers with anachronistic utility-style regulations such as rate regulation, tariffs, or network sharing requirements.”
● If there is one thing the Commission could do to ensure competition and openness, it would be to compel network sharing. The Commission could mandate that CenturyLink, Cox, Comcast, TimeWarner, PacBell, and every other carrier with phone or cable lines in the ground decouple their internet services from their physical connections. Instantly, third-party providers could enter the market, as long as the Commission ensured that the incumbents could not charge more to the third-parties than it costs themselves to provide the physical connection. (Again, this isn’t an argument for regulation, but an acknowledgement that the strict, tight regulation of decades past tainted the communications networks that became open to the free market in 1984. Had the government not interfered, the market would have evolved differently and not needed to solve these problems on its own.)
● The Commission here states that it will not set pricing, enabling broadband providers to charge more to pay for the burden of compliance with regulations. Regulations invariably impose additional costs for compliance, and service providers must pass those costs along. But the Commission fails to mention banning fees such as the Universal Service Fund that you find assessed on every telephone bill. Look into the USF and one of the programs it supports, the “Connect America Fund”: You will find this to be another example of wasteful government pork, funded by a tax levied against the consumer, against you and against me.
“[T]he Order reclassifies “broadband Internet access service” … as a telecommunications service under Title II. This decision is fundamentally a factual one. It recognizes that today broadband Internet access service is understood by the public as a transmission platform through which consumers can access third-party content, applications, and services of their choosing.”
● There’s that antiquated law again. 1934, meet Internet; Internet, meet 1934. Hey, 1934, watch out for that Hitler fellow, he’s a bad egg!
● Here the Commission asserts that its decision is fundamentally factual. That may appease some, but the “facts” the Commission has tossed about so far in this press release are bogus, irrelevant, lies, or some combination of the three.
● Nothing has changed about the public perception of the internet. What has changed is that the public is using the internet to supplant other communications channels, and the government is losing revenue. Whether or not you believe that the government should make “revenue” through confiscatory taxation, you should be concerned that estimates for tax “revenue” to be generated from “Net Neutrality” range from $6.5 billion to $15 billion per year, or more.
● Considering all of the “facts” the Commission has cited so far, not one has anything to do with protecting consumers, or giving them a choice of broadband providers.
“Using it here—without the limitations of the common carriage prohibition that flowed from earlier the [sic] ‘information service’ classification—bolsters the Commission’s authority.”
● Here the Commission uses the lowercase courts to support this argument, even though the Commission has dismissed the same courts repeatedly to now.
● In citing the courts, the Commission choses to remove limits on government—the same big government whose citizens lament its inefficiency, as evidenced by every poor sap transacting business at the DMV—and grow government power, taking it from the states, the citizens, the consumers.
The situation should leave you utterly incredulous. With a few strokes of a pen, unelected bureaucrats continue to grow the federal government, increase its intrusion into your life, and lay a foundation that could lead to limiting the sacrosanct freedom of speech. More to come…