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What is FCC HIding? Show Us

Investors Business Daily

Feb. 25, 2015

INTRODUCTION

Net Neutrality can be described on a single page. So what are in the either 331 pages the FCC doesn't want you to see? Licenesed required (with heavy fees) for globs? Content control under "Standards and practices" as is now done with TV? Transfer of the public bandwidth into corporate control (again, as was done with radio and TV)?

It looks like the government created the whole "Net Neutrality Crisis" to get us to go along with allowing the White House to seize control of the internet, which has become a major threat to those who rule by lies and deception.

Mike Rivero

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What Is FCC Hiding? Show Us

Transparency:The Federal Communications Commission plans sweeping new regulations on the Internet that it claims will help consumers. If so, why are they keeping these rules hidden before voting on them Thursday?

For years, the FCC has been trying to impose itself on the Internet in name of "net neutrality," only to be thwarted by the courts. Even net neutrality backers can point to only fear, not harm, as justification for such intervention.

Rather than admit net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler decided — at the urging of President Obama — to regulate the Internet under what's called Title II. That's the part of the law that established the FCC and would let the government regulate competitive Internet service providers as though they were Ma Bell circa 1935.

Wheeler has refused to release the 332-page plan he wants the commission to approve on Thursday, citing FCC tradition as the reason.

Thankfully, one of the two Republican-appointed commissioners, Ajit Pai, decided not to sit quietly and has been sounding the alarm. Whatever Wheeler claims, Pai says the plan he's proposing will "impose rules upon almost every nut and bolt of the Internet."

In an op-ed published by Politico on Monday, Pai and Lee Goodman, a Republican on the Federal Election Commission, warns that once this plan is approved, the FCC will be able to decree "whether companies can offer consumer-friendly service plans ... institutionalize innovation by permission (and) force private companies to physically deploy broadband infrastructure and route Internet traffic in specific ways."

As an added bonus, the rules will unleash trial lawyers to file class-action suits whenever they think the new rules have been violated.

Even if the rules did start small, regulators will only find new ways to impose their will on ISPs as time goes by. In the end, the only people harmed will be the consumers who supposedly are in need of the FCC's protection.

Pai and Goodman note that Europe has already gone this route with their Internet industry, and the result is slower speeds and a more limited broadband reach.

It's unlikely making the rules available would change the vote's outcome — Democrats have a 3-2 advantage. But the public deserves nothing less than to see what FCC has in store for the Internet before the commissioners cast their ballots.

Four Winds 10 - News