I don’t get it. The President promised, “I remain firmly committed to Net Neutrality so we can keep the Internet as it should be — open and free.”
The FCC, with the President’s own technology visionary as Chairman and a 3/5ths majority, has the means, motive and opportunity to make sure the Internet remains open and free. But the FCC is behaving as if the Internet’s future will be decided by big communications companies that paid no attention to the Internet until it became a threat to their business. Why, oh why is the FCC letting big business negotiate away our Internet in secret?
The Supreme Court has declared (in the Brand X decision, 2005) that “the Commission is free within the limits of reasoned interpretation to change course if it adequately justifies the change.” In other words, the FCC has a priori Supreme Court approval to regulate Internet access as basic Telecommunications, whereby, “Telecommunications carriers … must charge just and reasonable, nondiscriminatory rates to their customers … design their systems so that other carriers can interconnect with their communications networks,” etc. In Brand X, the Court said the FCC could classify Internet access as a Title 1 service (i.e., an Information service). But it spoke very generally to the issue of the FCC’s authority to decide whether a service is a Title 1 (Information) or a Title 2 (Telecommunications) service — it said that the FCC had plenty of authority to decide.
Last year Earlier this year, a lower court decided that the FCC could not stop Comcast from messing with Bittorrent (and other peer-to-peer protocols) because it had previously (under chairmen Powell and Martin) decided to regulate Internet access under Title 1. It left open the question of reclassification of Internet access under Title 2. But the Supreme Court’s Brand X opinion had already made it explicitly clear that the FCC had full, unambiguous authority to decide the Title 1 -Title 2 question, and to change its mind as market conditions changed.
Then, last May, FCC Chairman Genichowski floated a very sensible proposal to restore the FCC’s ability to ensure that broadband access to the Internet is non-discriminatory by classifying the transmission component of Internet access as a Telecommunications service with as light a hand as possible.
Now Chairman G’s proposal has gone nowhere. In its place, we have Google and Verizon making back-room deals, while the other elephants do a slow, cheek-to-cheek grind.
I don’t get it. The Chairman of the FCC proposed a way to do it, the Supreme Court has already pre-approved it, and Commissioners Copps and Clyburn would be HAPPY to provide an FCC majority vote. So what’s with this FCC Chairman? One stroke of the pen, and the fundamental success factors of the Internet would be firmly guaranteed.
Who runs the White House? Larry Summers?
Technorati Tags: BarackObama, BrandX, Comcast, FCC, Google, JuliusGenachowski, Scotus, Verizon




