Tech at Night took Christmas off (in fact I even decided not to bother to put up a post saying I was taking Christmas off), so I have some catch up to do. Looks like nine links tonight, so let’s start.
Jack Shafer at Slate of all places has made fun of Net Neutrality by detailing what might have happened had the FCC regulated information services back in 1993 instead of starting it now in 2010. Poor Marc Andreessen really does take the brunt of it, but it’s funny and enlightening at the same time.
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Tech at Night is starting a little later tonight than I planned. I ended up showing my brother The Greatest American Hero on Netflix. Oddly enough I had no trouble with that despite the Net Neutrality framework not having taken effect.
But yes, the big story is that the FCC voted to regulate the Internet. This has been coming for a long time, but now that it’s happened, our side is motivated like never before. Here’s a roundup.
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Tomorrow, tomorrow, the FCC is meeting tomorrow, December 21. The key item on the agenda is Net Neutrality. So of course, The FCC couldn’t keep its website up. And they want to regulate the entire Internet?
What’s at stake? Socialist plans to remake all the mass media in America in the style of Hugo Chavez. Al Franken’s bulling tactics succeeding. And overall, an unprecedented power grab online.
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Next week the FCC meets to make a decision on Net Neutrality. So there’s plenty going on as all sides press the FCC to do one thing or another. Some are lobbying more competently than others, though. Doing well are the Senate Republicans who prepare to fight and the incoming House Committee leadership who are getting loud on Net Neutrality and the runaway FCC.
Doing not so well are the forces of regulation caught this week making bad mistakes. First is the fringe neo-Marxist group Free Press. The Free Press tech brain trust made a terrible technical mistake on its website by sending anti-Comcast letters when they promised to send pro-Internet Takeover letters. Second we have radicals Media Access Project and Public Knowledge lying about Amazon’s Net Neutrality position, making the firm out to be taking a hardline pro-Internet Takeover position when in fact the firm supports a modest compromise.
If the radicals can’t even run their own lobbying efforts correctly, why should we trust them to run the entire Internet?
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Once upon a time I used to be sleep at midnight. Of course, if I’d buckle down and get Tech at Night out the door a few hours earlier, then I’d be able to be asleep right now at midnight, I suppose. Regardless, here we go.
The FCC’s Net Neutrality vote is still on for the 21st, that is, Tuesday. Of course they’d miss the regular Tech at Night schedule after all of this. The FCC couldn’t make it easy on me, oh no. The good news though is that by now the storyline is that Republicans think the FCC is going too far, most Democrats are ready to move the heck on already, and radical Democrats think the FCC doesn’t go too far enough.
If the FCC were to try something radical, it’s clear the courts would have none of it, just as in Comcast v. FCC which started this whole mess. But that will take time and will scare off investment. Who benefits from an underinvested Internet? Nobody. So we’ve just got to push for the lightest possible touch from the FCC, but remind them that Fred Upton and company are waiting in case they try a fast one.
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Now that the FCC has made itself the center of attention by planning a big power grab online, it may be the case that the FCC gets some unwanted attention. The Free State Foundation is calling out the FCC for not being very open even as the FCC is calling for an Open Internet™. Here’s the punchline, but read the whole thing, and that’s not something I say often in this space:
But preserving the Open FCC is much more fundamentally important to the public, over the short, medium, and long term. I have my doubts concerning how the FCC’s dumping of 1900 pages of documents into the public record on the eve of the date it cuts off public participation is consistent with preserving an Open FCC.
The last time I saw a data dump this bad was when Saddam Hussein was toying with the UN Security Council. That’s just great company for Julius Genachowski, FCC Chairman, to have put himself in.
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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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Oh boy, I’m tired tonight. It would be so tempting to give Tech at Night a pass tonight but I have clothes in the dryer anyway, so let’s go.
Let’s talk about Net Neutrality. In fact, let’s talk about who’s funding the voices supporting Net Neutrality. Bob Parks of Black and Right and posting right here at RedState did some digging and found that CREDO Mobile is funding some Net Neutrality advocates. And the Net Neuties claim they have no Evil Corporate Interests™ behind them. Never let them forget that the FCC acting on this issue is the FCC choosing to favor one set of corporations over another. And the losers are those that invest in the Internet… and we all know what happens when we punish investment in the internet: we get less of it in the future.
That’s why we’ve got to minimize the damage done by the FCC this month. We need a light, light, light touch if we have to have regulation at all.
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I’ve been saying lately that the likely Net Neutrality outcome wouldn’t be bad at all, that we’d get a compromise that disappoints the radical left far more than it disappoints us. But it’s not a done deal. We’ve got to keep the pressure up, both as activists and through the incoming Republican majority in the House. The FCC must respect the 2010 elections and their consequences.
So we need to ask: Why isn’t the FCC even talking to the key ranking members of the relevant committees: Kay Bailey Hutchison and Joe Barton? Joe Barton and Cliff Stearns even sent the FCC a letter asking them to explain where in the law they get their authority to do what they’re planning. Why are Republicans being ignored and dismissed?
Do we have to threaten to defund come next year to get anywhere? If the FCC won’t work with Republicans then I don’t see how Republicans won’t have to play hardball in return and work actively to disrupt the FCC’s ability to do anything at all. So the FCC desperately needs to work with Republicans instead of letting the far left fringe be the swing vote in all of this.
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