communications

We are powerless only if we allow ourselves to be powerless, but we can stop in, we can take action, so that our free speech rights, which are the first and foremost right that we must cherish and protect in this country, will continue to be protected even against multinational tech cartels.

Heartland’s Donald Kendal and Jim Lakely are joined by Isaac Orr in episode #204 of the In The Tank Podcast. This episode features work from Nature Communications, the Cato Institute, and the Goldwater Institute.

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.

Recently, the Federal Communications Commission has proposed to construct a new, additional regulatory apparatus, asserting, without any factual support, that creating untested and discriminatory rules for internet service providers (ISPs) will be the silver bullet for protecting consumers’ privacy.

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.

In arbitrarily applying Title II telecommunications rules to only the ISP half of Internet communications, while politically exempting the entire edge half of Internet communications in its Open Internet order, the FCC has ensured that information that was proprietary and controllable in the closed telephone world becomes public and uncontrollable in the open Internet world.