It is now time for POTUS to get even tougher on the issue of common carrier regulation given the arguments circulating in the Beltway, if only because
Net Neutrality reveals some of the basic contradictions inherent in telecommunications political economy and why whenever the GOP speaks of limited government, it means Mussolini and the trains running on time.
For example, a flak at The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity writes in The Hill using the inherently contradictory analysis of public utility necessity and natural monopolies
The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity is a conservative online news organization in the United States that publishes news and commentary from a free market, limited government perspective on state and local governance and politics. Wikipedia
Ah, the canard of "free market, limited government" or Dummies for Reaganism. They are correct that we get ripped off every month in the incomprehensible fee structure of our utility bills writ now digitally but is precisely because of neoliberal deregulatory policy that the industry makes a killing off our ignorance about service contracts, service area, providers, and infrastructure much like we got screwed with real estate financing during the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
Title II of the Communications Act is an outdated law written for the purpose of regulating rapidly-expanding technologies like telephone and radio service. It governs “common carriers,” which are public utilities subjected to hundreds of pages of federal regulations designed to ensure that they act “in the public interest” by providing the exact same service, at the same rate, to everyone.
These regulations make sense for electric, gas, and landline phone service, since there isn’t a way for utility companies to deliver services in a significantly more innovative way than competitors who use the same technology and infrastructure to deliver the same product. When it comes to internet access, however, it’s a different ball game. Infrastructure is new and evolving at unprecedented rates. Recent innovations in fiber-optics, for example, are opening up an entirely new avenue for broadband delivery. Given how much the internet has revolutionized our lives in just the past ten years, it’s absurd to think that an 80-year-old law will ensure the best service to consumers going forward.
The even darker side of bringing the Internet under Title II is that it will impose new fees on broadband access. Under current FCC rules, telecommunications carriers must contribute to the federal Universal Service Fund, a fee that stands at 16.1 percent of interstate telecommunications revenue. Under the current prices of broadband, that works out to a bill increase of about $7.25 a month for the average customer.
As a former FCC commissioner has said, that “would be perhaps the largest, one-time tax increase on the Internet."
Such a good talking meme for 'baggers if it weren't so fucking counter-intuitive. 'Baggerism would be more believable if tax resistance extended to regulatory industries, with Kochian doomsday preppers stocking their bunkers because of the taxes hidden in their phone bills.
Those tax revenues would not a bad thing considering the entire theory of Universal Service as spatially redistributive and fair as economic populism, especially as we move to greater renewable energy. It is precisely for these reasons of evolving Smart Grid technologies that "These regulations make sense for electric, gas, and
landline phone service, since there isn’t a way for utility companies to deliver services in a significantly more innovative way than competitors who use the same technology and infrastructure to deliver the same product." In an age where landline phone service is increasingly defaulting to wireless and television delivery is multi-provider in a multi-dimensional public utility grid-space infrastructure, much like electrical power itself may become wireless rather than wireline or self-sufficient, that common carrier regulation makes sense. And under Title II, Net Neutrality provides for greater efficiency and greater control of the inefficiencies of corporate concentration in an already chaotic economy.
Only the
DLC dumbfucks who gave us deregulation and the commodification embodied in the Telecom Act of 1996 could envision that infrastructure could never be more than about cell towers or fiber to the curb. It's laughable that AT&T wants to "pause" fiber infrastructure deployment which has always been about profiting from dark (graymarket) fiber anyway. It's time to toss out VHS stupidity in an age of the DVR.
more interesting is how knowledge aggregation as big data interprets a blog's semantics