re: Senator Cruz doubles down on Net Neutrality argument

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The FCC has regulated the Internet since its inception.

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Regulating Internet's Future By Changing The Past
by Phil Kerpen
4/22/2010

Wednesday–less than two weeks after a court decision exposing that the Federal Communications Commission has no legal authority to regulate the Internet–the FCC is scheduled to temporarily shelve its regulatory agenda to begin work on other aspects of its National Broadband Plan. This official event aside, Washington is abuzz over whether the FCC will attempt to manufacture regulatory authority over broadband Internet.

The most likely strategy? Rewrite history.

Advocates of heavy regulatory control over the Internet seem to have proposed just that. According to this revised history, policymakers regulated the Internet until the last administration turned it over to corporate controllers. Susan Crawford–former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation policy–says that “under the Bush administration the FCC deregulated high-speed Internet.” But the truth is nearly precisely the opposite.
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The agency went on to affirm the treatment of broadband Internet as an unregulated information services at every opportunity, including cable modem service in 2002, DSL in 2005 and mobile broadband in 2007.

The policy has been a tremendous success. The Internet–in the absence of regulation–has flourished into a remarkable engine of economic growth, innovation, competition and free expression. Such triumph makes a compelling argument for continuing existing policies.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals recently repudiated the Federal Communications Commission’s claims regarding its authority to regulate the Internet in the name of net neutrality. President Obama and FCC chairman Julius Genachowski (a personal friend of the president) have two options if they insist on continuing to pursue regulation.

The straightforward, transparent option would be to ask Congress to consider legislation aimed at regulating broadband. This would likely be a futile effort given how little support exists for Internet regulation among the public and their elected representatives.
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Unfortunately, the president who famously said “I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality” may consider a lack of public and legislative support not a warning sign that he’s wrong but an invitation to instruct the FCC to pursue the backdoor option, bolstered by revisionist history, of controlling the Internet by classifying it as a telephone system.

LINK

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