communications

Government often seems quite adept at solving yesterday’s problems, building or protecting systems that are irrelevant today.

The evidence increasingly proves that Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, companies collectively known as “GAFA,” are the dominant consumer-technology, “edge” platforms/incumbents in their respective communication sector markets of: information, smartphones, social media, and ecommerce. The evidence below shows Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon to clearly be the emerging dominant communications incumbents of the 21st century communications sector ecosystem and that an apparent FCC assumption that “edge” companies cannot be a competition problem is both naïve and erroneous.

Looking backwards at 1934-era Title II telephone utility law, the FCC concluded in its 2015 Open Internet Order that only broadband providers could be “gatekeepers” warranting net neutrality regulation to “protect and promote the “virtuous cycle” that drives innovation and investment on the Internet.”

Let me try to explain to a consumer what the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) arbitrarily has done, and apparently intends to do, for consumer internet privacy protection going forward.

“Mission creep” as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “the gradual broadening of the original objectives of a mission or organization.” Mission creep as practiced by the Federal Communications Commission is wholesale bootstrapping to create any authority to reach to a goal of ever more regulation of innovation.

Google is cleverly and stealthily leveraging a Google-friendly-FCC and lax U.S.-Google antitrust enforcement to extend its global Android mobile operating system dominance to increasingly disintermediate and dominate the spectrum administration function embedded in the firmware of smartphones, connected cars, and Internet of Things devices.

There should be no innovation or competition double standard where government politically picks winners and losers by rigging competition via denying some companies the freedom to innovate and compete spectrally while granting it to their competitors.

Democrat Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) just penned an editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle. That has the patchouli whiff of her writing while sitting at the corner of Haight and Ashbury – in August 1968. It is warmed-over Hippie-Dippie, Flower Power, Socialist nonsense.

The FCC’s irrational fear of commercial Internet fast lanes has detoured communications innovation to the government slow lane.

The collateral damage is beginning to pile up from the FCC’s February decision to trigger Title II telephone utility regulation of the Internet. Long called the “nuclear” option, the FCC preemptively triggered Title II Internet regulation ostensibly to prevent potential new net neutrality problems, which the FCC admits it can’t yet identify.

The National Cancer Institute is wasting taxpayer dollars on slanted e-cigarette research that didn’t ask or answer an obvious and important question.

February 26 was a particularly terrible day – in a six-plus year history of terrible Barack Obama Administration days.

The FCC is considering administratively bypassing Congress and unilaterally reversing longstanding U.S. Internet policy in law with an administrative maneuver that could have sweeping and unintended negative consequences for U.S. trade and foreign policy.