Featured · Internet/Telecom · Podcast
Communications Director Jim Lakely sits down with the President of Less Government, Seton Motley, to discuss net neutrality in light of President Obama’s recent remarks on the subject.
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.
Nothing has changed my mind that it would be “unthinkable” for the FCC to classify Internet service providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, the part of the 1934 communications law derived directly from the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The purpose of the Interstate Commerce Act was to constrain what was then seen as the monopolistic power of the railroads. The railroads were deregulated in the 1980s – long before the emergence today’s broadband Internet providers.
Currently the FCC is considering reversing the legal status of American Internet services from lightly-regulated information services to utility-regulated “telecommunications” services in response to a 2014 appeals court decision that limited a portion of the FCC’s net neutrality regulatory authority.
Back in 1997, then-FCC Chairman Reed Hundt titled a speech, “Thinking About Why Some Communications Mergers Are Unthinkable.” In his address, Mr. Hundt explained why, in his view, it was “unthinkable” to contemplate a merger between AT&T and one of the Bell Operating Companies. A principal reason had to do with what Mr. Hundt claimed would be the “resulting concentration” of “the long distance market.”
The FCC’s invitation has prompted a “rainbow of policy and legal proposals” that would explore “new ideas for protecting and promoting the open Internet” by imposing Title II telecommunications regulation on America’s Internet infrastructure.
The FTC implicitly laid down an important jurisdictional, political, and public marker against FCC reclassification of broadband as a utility, in its recent FCC filing in the FCC’s Section 706 inquiry proceeding.
Is the Internet consumer in charge or the product sold to others? Is net neutrality about protecting consumers or Silicon Valley?
We’ll learn the answers to these critical questions in the coming months when the FCC votes on a redo of its “Open Internet” order implementing net neutrality.
This ain’t about Comcast’s purchase of Time Warner. It’s about the Obama Administration’s yet again squid ink-like “transparency.”
The Left consists of two groups of people running on two parallel yet very different paths to Oblivion.
The Left’s leadership knows their Huge Government ideas are absurd and don’t work – but they’ll be in charge after the collapse they induce so they’re fine with it.
Featured · Internet/Telecom · Legal Affairs
Last week a federal judge ordered Microsoft to hand over its data stores to the government, including data housed overseas. The ruling marks an ominous new chapter in Internet privacy, one that could have lasting impacts on both individuals’ privacy online and the nature of international law.
Google has privacy clay feet. The NSA and Big Data may also, since they are relying on many of the same outdated legal assumptions as Google. In the last few months, both the U.S. Supreme Court and European authorities have made new baseline privacy decisions that have greatly strengthened individuals’ right to privacy. As a result, they’ve also exposed and heightened Google’s massive privacy liabilities.
If Silicon Valley folks are indeed the smartest of the smart, how could they be so easily fooled on net neutrality? Normally smarts distinguish between what’s testable and real versus[…]
Featured · Government · Internet/Telecom · Legal Affairs
In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described the “memory hole,” a chute leading to a vast incinerator into which all unwanted documents were cast. The memory hole served as the ultimate form of state censorship, destroying any trace of information deemed to pose a threat to the regime. Thanks to a ruling in May by the European Court of Justice, a genuine digital memory hole has come online.
Eighty years ago. The depths of the Great Depression. Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt blindly flailing around, throwing ever more government-centric “solutions” at the growing list of problems. Each new[…]
The FCC has asserted a foundational regulatory premise that warrants rebuttal and disproving, given that the FCC is considering if Internet access, and Internet backbone peering, should be regulated like a utility under Title II telephone common carrier regulation.
Does Netflix have any responsibility to help provide its users the streaming service that they paid Netflix for by connecting with ISPs in the high quality manner that most all other content delivery networks do? In other words, why is Netflix such an outlier here?
Remember the opening line from “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,”one of my favorite Jimmy Buffet songs: “I took off a weekend this month Just to try to recall the whole[…]
So it turns out there that something doesn’t have to be true to be funny. Many a thinking American – who knows media bias – finds the following perversely appropriate.[…]
We are almost six years into the Barack Obama Administration. This president has been almost undoubtedly the worst ever at exceeding his Constitutional authority. “A phone and a pen” are[…]
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