Amazon

The FCC would be making a long-shot bet-the-farm gamble, if it decided to mandate the broadband public option i.e. deeming broadband to be a common-carrier-regulated service and regulating the Internet essentially for the first time. 

• It would be a classic lose lose gamble because:
  • The FCC is very likely to lose in court -- accomplishing nothing, but damaging the hard-built trust, cooperation, and commitment necessary for public-private partnerships to be able to get broadband to all Americans fastest; and
  • Everyone else would lose from the irreparable damage to private broadband investment, innovation, growth, jobs, and America's broadband ranking in the world. 

I.   Lose in Court:

FTC antitrust concerns over "inter-locking-directorates" reportedly have forced Kleiner-Perkins' John Doerr, to step down from Amazon's board, because he is also on the board of Amazon, a major book and cloud-computing competitor of Google -- per Miguel Helft's and Brad Stone's scoop at the New York Times Bits post.

This is the third (Amazon, Apple, Yahoo) too-cozy-for-antitrust-authorities, Keiretsu-like, Google business relationship that either the DOJ or FTC apparently have broken up. 

eBay is licking their chops at the prospect of the FCC's open Internet regulations locking in their dominance of:

• Online auctions (95% share); 
• P-2-P voiceware (via #1 Skype's ~500m users); 
• Classified ads ( #1 in revenues); and
• Online payments (via eBay's #1 PayPal).

Like Google, eBay knows that "openness" is industrial-policy-speak for:

The FCC's claims that their proposed net neutrality regulations would just "preserve" the open Internet are simply not true. The facts are clear that the FCC's  proposed regulations would:

Given that the apparent justification for new formal net neutrality rules is that fifteen-year policy has failed and that the market is unable to ensure consumer choice, the FCC will need to justify with facts that broadband providers indeed have market power to exercise anti-competitively.

What an "Open Internet" does not mean is as important as what it does mean.

• Surely an "Open Internet" is not intended to mean what it certainly can mean: un-protected, unguarded, or vulnerable to attack. 


• Thus, it is essential for the FCC to be explicit in defining what the terms -- "Open Internet," "net neutrality," and Internet non-discrimination -- don't mean, as well as what they do mean.

The word "open" has 88 different definitions per Dictionary.com and the word "open" has even more different connotations depending on the context. While the term "open" generally has a positive connotation to mean un-restricted, accessible and available, it can also have a negative or problematic connotation if it means unprotected, unguarded or vulnerable to attack.  

With due to credit to "Ripley's Believe it or Not!^®," so much odd and bizarre is happening in Washington in the "name" of "wireless innovation" and competition that the topic calls for its own collection of: "Believe it or Not!^®" oddities.