Posted on 12/03/2010 8:58:24 AM PST by yoe
It's time to close the Federal Communications Commission. This week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski gave a speech outlining his push for net neutrality, the absurd notion that the Internet should be "open and free" when in fact it's quite expensive to build. Net neutrality will straitjacket the U.S. economy's single most important driver of productivity and transformation.
Besides the obvious question of whether the FCC even has the authority to regulate the Web—in April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said it doesn't—the agency has a long history of restraining trade. Founded in 1934 partly to regulate radio spectrum (which in reality hasn't ever been scarce), the FCC delayed FM radio by favoring AM and television in spectrum allocation, mandated a TV network oligopoly by restricting station ownership, and kept long-distance rates too high for decades by forcing operators to subsidize local telephone costs. Now, because of bad bandwidth policy, it limits what smart phones can really do.
[snip] "No central authority, public or private, should have the power to pick which ideas or companies win or lose," Mr. Genachowski says, "that's the role of the market and the marketplace of ideas."
[snip] It all sounds great. But incredibly, nowhere does he mention competition, a necessary condition of a marketplace. By discouraging competition in local access and refusing to change arcane licensing rules, this regime would freeze in place Google, Comcast, Verizon Wireless and ESPN just as the next wave of services will emerge to delight us.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Where are the loud, overly critical voices heard during the Bush administration on this issue?
Give me the budget, a red magic marker, and the power to enforce my edicts, and I would save the country. Be fun too.
I could do it in about 1/2 hour.
Lie #1. Net neutrality means "free" as in speech, not "free" as in beer.
Additional fact: We the taxpayers paid for much of the Internet. I'm not counting the initial building by the government, but the billions in subsidies and tax breaks we've given to telcos to provide 40 Mbps to everyone's house by now. Oh, few people have that? Why am I not surprised?
Net neutrality will straitjacket the U.S. economy's single most important driver of productivity and transformation.
Lie #2: Net neutrality prevents the telcos from straightjacketing the "single most important driver of productivity and transformation." It tries to keep the net neutrality that created the huge success that is the Internet in face of telco attempts to restrict it.
Besides the obvious question of whether the FCC even has the authority to regulate the Web
Lie #3: Net neutrality does not try to regulate the Web. It prevents carriers from interfering with the Web.
But there is a kernel of truth in whether the FCC has the authority to enforce net neutrality. I don't like over-reaching bureaucracies even if they are on my side.
the absurd notion of "open and free"
So long as libtards evade the difference between economic power and political power, between a private choice and a government order, between intellectual persuasion and physical force, libtards have reason to assume that they can safely stretch their evasions all the way to the ultimate inversion: to the claim that a private action is coercion, but a government action is freedom.
What’s the purpose of the FCC now that Howard Stern is off terrestrial radio? Have they fined anyone since he went to satellite radio?
If the Constitution doesn't mention it specifically, get rid of it. Period.
Only problem:
You have a conservative talk station. Some guy decides to put their own station on right next to yours, and now due to splashover your station is unlistenable. License? They don’t
need no stinkin’ license! You want to make money but what if
people can’t hear your station (in cars, at home etc.)
For that at least, you need the FCC...
If we need a standards organization, come up with a PRIVATE group like the electronic industries IEEE.
Not just for the FCC either... FAA, NASA, FDA, etc... Privatize or make them extinct.
Nothing says "interstate commerce" in the original sense like the Internet. If a company that does business in multiple states and transmits data between those states decides to block or degrade transmissions from another corporation operating in multiple states, that's pretty clearly an interstate commerce issue. The Internet even goes international, definitely in the purview of the federal government.
They aren't. So they must go away.
I’m not referring to the FCC specifically, but net neutrality is definitely an interstate commerce issue. If Congress decides to give the FCC the responsibility to enforce that part of interstate commerce, then so be it. Some part of the government logically has to enforce the laws.
Only for the occasional ‘wardrobe malfunction’.
Unrelated to net neutrality.
It’s the FCC over stepping it’s boundaries. Same thing happens with EVERY organization our FedGov tries to run outside the Constitution.
Yes, but then on the issue itself there has been proposed legislation that basically mirrored the proposed FCC regulation.
Are you REALLY going to argue FOR the FedGov on this one?
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