quote:
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.

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Posted by Iosh

Bureau of Interstellar Immigration

Member since Dec 2012

18941 posts

Posted on 11/18/14 at 4:00 pm to NC_Tigah

quote:
Here is a salient piece written for Forbes Magazine in 2010

If by "salient," you mean "full of equivocation," then sure.

quote:
Wednesday–less than two weeks after a court decision exposing that the Federal Communications Commission has no legal authority to regulate the Internet

Right off the bat, that's a hilariously broad reading of FCC v. Comcast, which was a decision about ancillary jurisdiction that didn't even touch on statutory jurisdiction. Not off to a promising start.

quote:
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.

Note how here we're talking about "the Internet."

quote:
Broadband Internet service has never been regulated like old-fashioned telephone lines. The FCC settled the matter definitively in 1998, when Clinton-appointed FCC Chairman William Kennard demolished the same reclassification arguments being made today in that year’s report to Congress.

And here we're talking about "broadband internet." No doubt because ignoring the existence and rise of the Internet through the entirety of the dial-up era is convenient for the author's point. Also convenient: treating a report to Congress as "definitively" settling the matter.

quote:
Notably, the Kennard report itself did not represent a departure from earlier policy with respect to the non-regulation of Internet services. It even noted that the 1996 Act left in place the framework created in the Carter-era by the 1980 Computer II decision.

Also convenient: ignoring the Reagan-era Computer III decision which expressly required Baby Bells who acted as ISPs or affiliated with ISPs to share their lines with independent ISPs.

quote:
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.

Now these are definitive. Which is why they're glossed over extremely quickly because they happen to more or less confirm the story he wants to refute. Hey, speaking of Computer III, guess when that common carrier requirement was lifted? LINK

"In the past, the Commission required facilities-based providers to offer that wireline broadband transmission component separately from their Internet service as a stand-alone service on a common-carrier basis, and thus classified that component as a telecommunications service. Today, the Commission eliminated this transmission component sharing requirement, created over the past three decades under very different technological and market conditions, finding it caused vendors to delay development and deployment of innovations to consumers."

Gosh, we sure wouldn't want that. I can just see the FCC in 2005. "If we lift these regulations, phone companies will finally be motivated to replace their old copper wire with new fiber optics and keep DSL from being left in the dust against cable!"