Congress

The discussion at the Federalist Society about former U.S. Solicitor General Greg Garre's excellent legal analysis  (that the FCC does not have the legal authority to promulgate Internet traffic rules), surfaced what I believe to be yet another insurmountable barrier for the FCC to overcome -- beyond the litany of legal barriers outlined by Mr. Garre.

• FCC reclassification of broadband as Title II common carriage would practically force the FCC to redefine competition in a way that would be arbitrary and capricious. 

Let me explain. 

Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn laid out  the counter argument to Mr. Garre's analysis that the FCC could reclassify broadband as Title II by simply revisiting the basis for the FCC's 2002 decision and overturning it as wrong on three counts:

Don't miss Digital Society's Bret Swanson's outstanding op-ed in the Huffington Post that spotlights the huge disconnect between the White House's top priority of creating jobs, and the FCC's Open Internet regulation plans that are obviously big net job killers. 

Common sense dictates that heavily regulating a healthy and economic broadband sector with unnecessary and intrusive restrictions and red tape will destroy profits, investment and tens of thousands of good-paying jobs.    

FCC Chairman Genachowski's speech to NARUC: "Broadband: Our Enduring Engine for Prosperity and Opportunity" raises some big open questions.

The biggest open question is whether Chairman Genachowski believes the titular "broadband engine" of his speech should remain a private sector "engine" that is private property and fueled by profit and investment returns, or whether the "broadband engine" should somehow become quasi public property, heavily regulated like a public utility, and more government funded and controlled.

Another big open question arises out of Chairman Genchowski's adoption of electricity as his new guiding metaphor in place of interstate highways.

Kudos to Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity for their spot-on report of quotes from FreePress that exposes what FreePress is really all about.

Their report shows, in FreePress' own words, that they are a dystopian nightmare masquerading as a public interest group protecting freedom of the press.

Google announced it plans to enter the competitive broadband market and will build out what it calls an "ultra-fast" fiber broadband network that would be available to 50,000 Americans, 500,000 at most.

Given that the purpose of my new watchdog site www.GoogleMonitor.com is making Google more transparent and accountable -- I offer some pertinent questions people may want to ask Google about its new high-profile broadband plans.

The Wall Street Journal reports that FCC Chairman Genachowski told them:

• “I don’t see any circumstances where we’d take steps to regulate the Internet itself,” Genachowski said Tuesday, during a meeting with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors. “I’ve been clear repeatedly that we’re not going to regulate the Internet.”

The big open question now is what exactly is "the Internet itself" to which the FCC Chairman is referring? 

At core the FCC's contemplation of reclassifying, or effectively treating, unregulated broadband info services as regulated telecom services, would be tantamount to the FCC declaring "eminent domain" over private broadband providers, i.e. justifying a government takings of private property for public uses, but doing so "without just compensation" or any statutory authority. 

If Congress and the Administration truly are focused on lowering unemployment and creating jobs, one of the easiest things they can do is tell the FCC to not kill potentially tens of thousands of jobs by preemptively regulating broadband Internet access to address a non-existent problem.   

Kudos to the American Consumer Institute for an excellent study on the job-killing impact of a net neutrality industrial policy which would effectively chose competitive broadband companies as job losers and much smaller and less job-intensive netopolies as winners. (See summary of study here.)

It is amazing that with one hand, the FCC is working on a National Broadband Plan to allegedly help the nation advance economically, while its other hand is totally working at cross-purposes economically -- pushing proposed net neutrality regulations that would kill jobs.

Please don't miss Andrew Keen's outstanding and dead-on-point op-ed in The Hill: "Internet Freedoms and Internet Radicals." 

Mr. Keen brilliantly proves how radical and out of the mainstream FreePress' and Public Knowledge's views are in calling for radical, preemptive, and draconian regulation of competitive broadband companies that have long supported, and operate under, the high-consensus voluntary principles of net neutrality. 

FreePress has one  trick, demonization. Like anything else that is overused, abused, and not true -- it loses credibility and only reflects badly on those practicing it. 

It is irresponsible for the FCC to consider self-creating new legal authority to impose net neutrality on ISPs by re-classifying currently unregulated information services as regulated telecom services (in the event that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the FCC does not have the legal authority to regulate the Internet in the FCC-Comcast case). 

First, claims of justifying such a hyper-regulatory potential FCC reclassification based on "the pro-competitive 1996 Telecommunications Act" is upside-down logic, given that the well-known purpose of that act was "To reduce regulation and promote competition...".  [bold added]