Wednesday, December 22, 2010

The FCC and 'net neutrality'


Readers are doubtless familiar with the FCC's attempt this week to regulate the Internet - something which is patently outside the bounds of its legal authority. John Fund, writing in the Wall Street Journal, leads us through the background to understand how and why the FCC is so desperate to overstep its authority, and why it's important that the new Congress act to rein it in before it's too late.

President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn't have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he's had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."

. . .

After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to "media reform" — a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct "Fairness Doctrine" that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and "said let's get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making." Together the two founded Free Press.

Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement.

. . .

Free Press and other groups helped manufacture "research" on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an "independent review of existing information" for the agency in order to "lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making."

Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.

The Berkman Center's FCC- commissioned report, "Next Generation Connectivity," wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.

The FCC's "National Broadband Plan," released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

So the "media reform" movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That's quite a coup.


There's more at the link. Bold print is my emphasis. I highly recommend that you read the whole article. It's interesting, troubling and thought-provoking.

I hope Congress acts in the New Year to overrule this nonsense. It's vital to stop the FCC - and, by extension, any State agency - side-stepping the legislative arm of government and attempting to rule by decree, rather than having the merits and demerits of a law openly debated, then passing it via the normal procedures of a constitutional republic.

The FCC's actions are nothing more or less than a naked power-grab by the Left, and must be stopped.

Peter

9 comments:

  1. Peter, you've made a serious mistake with this post.

    There are TWO different issues going on right now regarding the internet.

    One is government censorship, tied either to the "for the children" porn wars or more recently, the state's percieved "need" to clamp down on sites like Wikileaks.

    The other is net neutrality - which is a GOOD thing.

    Net neutrality is about blocking censorship by the corporations that provide internet services. Let's assume you get your internet feed into your house via, say, Time Warner. (Or Cox, Comcast, Verizon, whatever - called "ISPs" for "Internet Service Provider".)

    Those companies want the ability to choke off your access to websites they "don't like". There are several reasons they might do so:

    * Ideology of one sort or another.

    * Greed "type one": the ISPs want to be able to collect bribes from major websites to get put on a "faster pipe". So for example, MSNBC.COM might pay your ISP for faster access to that ISP's users. Other non-paying websites will inevitably get artificially slowed down to improve the odds that they'll pay up.

    * Greed "type two": some websites cost your ISP more than others, such as youtube. They would love to choke off or even deny access to youtube if they could, because it's overall a bandwidth hog. The only way they wouldn't is if google (owners of youtube) paid the bribes (see "greed type one").

    Worst of all, if ISPs get the legal green light to do this for their own benefit, you can bet they'll do it for any jack-booted thug that asks. Don't believe me? Look at how Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and Bank of America all tried various means to choke off Wikileaks' money supply. Or how ALL these companies (including google, yahoo and others) voluntarily censor themselves in places like China. (Do a google search for "tiananmen square" inside China and you will NOT get pics of people standing in front of tanks!!!)

    Net Neutrality is what we have NOW. It's what prevents the ISPs from choking off access to "controversial" stuff - such as blogger.com!!! The megacorps want to end it for reasons of pure profit, and they've managed to get a lot of the "tea party" types on their side via Fox News and such. And then they tie it to the censorship issue.

    Peter, you've been sold a pile of crap as a fresh-baked pie. Take another look.

    Jim March

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  2. Jim, I'm afraid I don't agree. The citations John Fund provides are genuine. 'Net Neutrality' is indeed what we now have - WITHOUT the FCC getting involved at all. Their 'power grab' is all about control, and has nothing whatsoever to do with neutrality.

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  3. I'm with Jim on this one. Net Neutrality is what we -almost- have now--with companies like Comcast already getting in trouble for throttling certain types and sources of traffic, Google and Verizon are in bed and making shady deals to do more of the same. The FCC is the group that -should- be granted the power by Congress to regulate and stop these sorts of shenanigans--and you call this a "power-grab by the left", but the left isn't happy with this half-ass FCC decision either! (It doesn't go far enough, in fact--it attempts to maintain net neutrality on ground-based carriers, but leaves wireless carriers wide open for abuse!)

    http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/24/engadget-explains-net-neutrality-and-our-full-interview-with/

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  4. Yeah, Peter, what Jim said. It would be just terrible if we didn't give the government the power to tell private companies what they can charge for data transmission across their communications infrastructure. *eyeroll*

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  5. Where is all the money coming from to pay for these "efforts" and why are aren't they paying their fair share. In this case, I'd vote for a 90% tax on the funds.

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  6. When I buy an "internet connection" today I'm getting a very specific service: an open pipe to the world.

    There are a LOT of players who are deathly afraid of that, either for ideological reasons, religious reasons or due to the pursuit of profit.

    The major ISPs want to sell me something very different: a controlled, managed gateway to what THEY want me to see. Yeah, to hell with that. Want a good example of such a "managed ecosystem"? Look at the Apple "apps store". Nothing controversial or political allowed, everything "safe" and "PG rated".

    An even better example is China.

    If the FCC wants to allow the ISPs to control my access, they'd damn well better not call the result an "internet connection". It will be something very different and with near certainty, something that is incapable of being used as a tool for political and social change as the Internet of today IS.

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  7. Jim: Your "better example" is GOVERNMENT CONTROLLED. Well done at making my point for me. Yours, not so much.

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  8. I'm a full-on registered Libertarian who is active in party politics.

    So when I say that you're making a classic Libertarian mistake, I speak with authority.

    The mistake is to assume that corporations aren't capable of just as much evil as governments, and worse ignoring the track record of cooperation with statism exhibited by the megacorps.

    Yes, China's state control over their Internet is horrendous. What the FCC is trying to do is enforce a LACK of control - by anybody - based on supporting 1st Amendment principles laid down by the US Supreme Court.

    The court's precedents right now support a free and open exchange of info on the Internet, having shot down various attempts to put controls in place to control "obscenity".

    That's the difference between the US and China.

    As to the argument that a "fairness doctrine" will be enforced: you BET it will with net neutrality! An ISP run by, say, the same people that control Fox news will not be allowed to slow down or block access to Democratic Party websites, any more than a left-leaning ISP will be allowed to block right-leaning sites. Which is exactly the situation we have now.

    There's absolutely no need to change anything.

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  9. The mistake is to assume that corporations aren't capable of just as much evil as governments

    How many people did corporations enslave and murder over the last hundred years, compared with governments? It's not an assumption that corporations aren't capable of as much evil as governments, it's a simple mechanical fact that corporations lack the coercive power that governments have, except when government rents theirs out.

    and worse ignoring the track record of cooperation with statism exhibited by the megacorps.

    I don't even really know how to respond to your apparently unironic claim that the best way to interfere with corporate cooperation with statism is by granting the state more authority.

    If the actual goal here was simply to unfetter bandwidth restrictions, the FTC is a much more appropriate agency to go to than the FCC.

    Simply require ISPs to advertise their guaranteed uplink/downlink speeds for a given price point, as opposed to their "maximum possible" speeds. Allow them to sell cheaper plans based on connections that get throttled back at high load times, but make sure they clearly label those plans. Done.

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