When I read the President’s Executive Order Accelerating Broadband Infrastructure Deployment, I’m reminded of the scene in Spaceballs when Dark Helmet tells the crew of Spaceball One “What are you preparing? You’re always preparing. Just go!”
For the Obama administration to spend a year preparing whether or not to address a list of reforms, instead of just doing them, suggests to me the administration simply isn’t serious about getting government out of the way.
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Curse Firefox. I’m getting to this much later tonight than I would have, thanks to a stinking Firefox 3.6 rendering bug, plus Firefox’s refusal to make it easy to work around Firefox rendering bugs. Microsoft Internet Explorer makes that easy with conditional comments. Firefox has no such feature, pretending it’s always right. Which is fine, except when Firefox 4 and Firefox 3.6 render the same page differently, and 3.6 does so wrongly.
Anyway. It’s still hard to argue against Free State Foundation and others who want to roll back the FCC wholesale when the FCC simply can’t tell the truth. Eight billion dollars of stimulus money went into broadband Internet in 2009. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, consider that the industry spends seventeen billion a year on it lately. This is a thriving, competitive market rushing to get better, faster, to keep and attract ever more customers.
And yet, the FCC’s claiming the market is failing. This is ridiculous and politically motivated. I discussed this on Friday but Seton Motley has more today on the lies in the Section 706 Report the FCC is mandated to put out every year. Two years in a row, just as wireless broadband is expanding the universe of competition like never before, the FCC is set to declare the market a failure. A letter grade of F. As Motley says, “the FCC is lying through it bureaucratic teeth.”
This is a ploy to prepare for a power grab. Watch your wallet, and your market.
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Good evening. Here’s a bit I’d never expect to read from the San Francisco Chronicle about Sprint’s begging for the FCC to pick winners and losers, instead of just standing aside and letting AT&T and T-Mobile get together:
At a time when wireless service is getting cheaper and more innovative, there is no reason for a Depression-era bureaucracy like the FCC to step in and regulate a dynamic and competitive marketplace.
Well put, I say. Even if the FCC’s Section 706 report on Broadband competition is a work of fiction. When 85% of US Census Tracts have two or more broadband providers according to your own numbers, and 98% have one or more, to give the industry a failing grade on infrastructure is a politically-motivated lie. The FCC is not doing its job honesty. They’re looking to regulate a booming industry (broadband user at home have gone up from 8 to 200 million Americans since 2000) to impose a socialist agenda. We must stop them and call out the lies.
Don’t believe me? Ask FCC Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Baker. McDowell says that “America has made impressive improvements” since 2000. Baker says she is “troubled” by the failing grade. They know the truth, and the FCC isn’t telling it.
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So the FCC is having another open meeting on Tuesday, February 8. A tentative agenda for that meeting has been published, and part of it looks dangerous. It’s written in conservative-friendly language, talking about streamlining processes and minimizing the burdens on the private sector, but there could be much more to it than that.
The agenda says the FCC is issuing “A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, initiated as part of the Commission’s Data Innovation Initiative, to streamline and modernize the collection of data via Form 477, in order to ensure that the data the Commission collects enables informed policymaking while minimizing burdens on voice and broadband service providers.” Note: this means the FCC isn’t just gathering data, but is already about to propose new rules. So what happens might happen quickly, so we’d best be sure we know just what the FCC is up to here.
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Happy Weekend. As I write this it’s already the 11th, so you have two shopping weeks left before Christmas. Oops, is it still legal on the Internet not to say Holiday?
Some quick hits for the weekend as we continue to wait on the FCC to explain itself and its plans for radical new Internet regulation.
George Ou points out that if Netflix gets to demand free peering with Comcast, then Netflix ought to demand free shipping over the postal service. After all, if neutral means free, then that’s the next step, right? Just shows how absurd the radicals really are in all of this. Network investment costs money and that money must be recouped with profit, or else that investment isn’t going to happen.
And again, if that investment stops happening, we all lose out.
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I’ve talked quite a bit how net neutrality is a big scam, and how it’s just a ruse to censor the Internet according to the desires of neo-Marxists like those at Free Press.
But there’s another, more basic reason, to join the majority of the House (including 171 Republicans) in opposing the runaway FCC: People are happy with their ISPs, both landline and wireless. The FCC itself says so:
Fully 91 percent of broadband users say they are “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with the speed they get at home. The comparable number for mobile broadband, which is not yet technologically capable of the same speeds as home broadband, is 71 percent satisfaction. As a point of comparison, 92 percent of cell phone users are very or somewhat satisfied with their cell phone service overall.
We don’t need new regulations, and especially not Net Neutrality regulations, when over 9 out of 10 people are happy with their high speed landline Internet access. Period.