Good evening. Or Good morning on the East Coast, as it’s unfortunately approaching 5am there as I start tonight’s edition. A big story is that the House Judiciary Committee will get into the game of watching the FCC, following in the footsteps of the Energy and Commerce, and Oversight committees. Commissioner Robert McDowell and Chairman Julius Genachowski are among those set to testify before Bob Goodlatte’s Competition subcommittee. I’m somewhat troubled by this, because Goodlatte seems to be looking for a government solution to a non-existent problem.
Hopefully Commissioner McDowell will set Goodlatte straight that we need a hands-off approach to the Internet, not creative reasons to increase regulation of a critical center of growth for our economy.
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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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Good evening. I’m not seeing anything huge as we pass the middle of the week. But, you never know what will become important, so let’s take a look at what caught my eye so far this week.
Even as Mary Bono Mack seeks to legislate on the news, or at least introduces a bill to make people feel better, Apple explains that the “location tracking” story was a non-story all along, just as I predicted. It was all about making GPS faster, and there was no real privacy issue.
Oh, yes. ICE is from the government, and it’s here to help. That is, if you’re a big copyright holder, but not if you’re a small patent holder.
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California’s Democrats, having refused to get tough with the unions who coincidentally will fund their re-election campaigns, are still determined to raise taxes. So they continue to push for an unconstitutional Amazon Tax on the Internet that just might cost the state more than it brings in, in the long run. They’re playing with “thresholds” to try to focus the bill on specific companies like Amazon, narrowing the tax base and making the idea even worse! So yes, as Calbuzz says, it’s still a bad deal for California.
And just think, soon the rest of the country going to face the same problem as Dick Durbin’s Internet Tax would target Amazon nationally.
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Good evening. Darrell Issa is stepping up the pressure on the FCC. He wants to tie spectrum reallocation incentives to Net Neutrality repeal. Many of us want to be able to reallocate spectrum from television stations to multipurpose wireless data, since we as a society are demanding more and faster data these days. If Darrell Issa makes the FCC’s ability to facilitate that, contingent on Net Neutrality repeal, then we’re playing a game of chicken. Issa: “Until net neutrality is rolled back, I don’t believe Congress is going to be willing to give the FCC any new power.”
It’s a fair position, and I’m ready to back him.
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In a startling turn of events, I’m starting tonight’s edition of Tech at Night at 6pm, roughly 8 hours earlier than I have been starting it lately. Imagine that.
Top story is a shocker. I mean, I had no idea the Democrats would get this far out there. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, wants to pass a national sales tax solely on Internet transactions. The sole purpose of this bill is to raise prices on all Americans who buy things online. This is basic stuff, folks. Every Republican needs to oppose this concept. Every single one. I will be taking names of the deadbeats who join with the Democrats on this, and I will be pushing for sanctions at the ballot box.
Meanwhile, The FCC is in need of major reform. Need to know why? Let’s start with this Harvard Business review look at the FCC. It’s not the most accessibly-written article, but it explains how the FCC is basically rigging its competition analyses to prevent itself from having to demonstrate that the wireless market is competitive. Direct evidence of competitive prices abounds, even in markets with less competition. I like this conclusion:
If regulators are opposed to consolidation as a means of addressing the spectrum crunch, the remedy is not to deny a licensee the right to sell or trade their spectrum as they see fit, but rather to get on the stick and get more spectrum out there faster. As in now.
House Republicans are on the case, too.
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Today, the House of Representatives voted to repeal Net Neutrality. H.J. Res 37, a resolution invoking the Congressional Review Act to reverse the FCC’s Net Neutrality order, passed the House under H.Res 200 by a 241-178 vote. Republicans voted 236-0 for repeal, while Democrats voted 178-5 against repeal. The five Democrats? Boren of OK, Conyers of MI, Costa of CA, Peterson of MN, and Shuler of NC. So of the Democrats you called, two went our way. We’ll have to remember the ones who chose to side with the San Francisco Democrat agenda instead of the (slightly) bipartisan position.
I feel good about this big win in the House today. I’ll let Fred Upton tell you why this vote was important:
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The final House vote is coming to repeal Net Neutrality via the Congressional Review Act. I’m pretty interested to see how many Democrats we can get in the House, because it may give a clue of how many Democrats we can get in the Senate. Remember: under the CRA we only need 51, not 60.
I hope we don’t have to fire up the CRA next over socialist wireless data roaming regulation. As I pointed out earlier this week, Sprint stopped investing in its network, while AT&T and Verizon spent even more. So now Sprint customers end up having to roam more when off of Sprint’s network. Should Sprint be allowed to make up for that by getting the government to force a special deal? I don’t think so. Regulation should reward investors and punish free riders. Only then do we truly look out for the public, the people who need more investment made.
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I’m late. No excuses. Let’s go.
So the courts threw out Verizon’s challenge of Net Neutrality, rejecting the very clever argument made by Verizon that it wasn’t premature. So now we wait for the actual publication of Net Neutrality to take place.
Well, to a point. The Republicans aren’t waiting and will vote this week in the full House to repeal Net Neutrality under the Congressional Review Act. Remember: this cannot be filibustered in the Senate, and so when it passes the House we only need 51 votes in the Senate, not 60. Seton Motley has some phone numbers to call if you’re represented by a key Democrat.
Tell ’em that even FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, as part of the 2/5 of the FCC that voted against Net Neutrality, still thinks it was a bad idea. Ask them his question: “Nothing is broken on the Internet, so what are we trying to fix?”
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