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Net Neutrality, Slippery Slopes & High-Tech Mutually Assured Destruction

by on October 23, 2009 · 43 comments

by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer, Progress Snapshot 5.11 (PDF)

Ten years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman lamented the “Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse:” the persistent propensity to persecute one’s competitors through regulation or the threat thereof. Friedman asked: “Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft?” After yesterday’s FCC vote’s to open a formal “Net Neutrality” rule-making, we must ask whether the high-tech industry—or consumers—will benefit from inviting government regulation of the Internet under the mantra of “neutrality.”

The hatred directed at Microsoft in the 1990s has more recently been focused on the industry that has brought broadband to Americans’ homes (Internet Service Providers) and the company that has done more than any other to make the web useful (Google). Both have been attacked for exercising supposed “gatekeeper” control over the Internet in one fashion or another. They are now turning their guns on each other—the first strikes in what threatens to become an all-out, thermonuclear war in the tech industry over increasingly broad neutrality mandates. Unless we find a way to achieve “Digital Détente,” the consequences of this increasing regulatory brinkmanship will be “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) for industry and consumers.

New Fronts in the Neutrality Wars

The FCC’s proposed rules would apply to all broadband providers, including wireless, but not to Google or many other players operating in other layers of the Net who favor such broadband-specific rules. With this rulemaking looming, AT&T came after Google with letters to the FCC in late September and then another last week accusing the company of violating neutrality principles in their business practices and arguing that any neutrality rules that apply to ISPs should apply equally to Google’s panoply of popular services. In particular, AT&T accused Google of “search engine bias,” suggesting that only government-enforced neutrality mandates could protect consumers from Google’s supposed “monopolist” control.

The promise made yesterday by the FCC—to only apply neutrality principles to the infrastructure layer of the Net—is hollow and will ultimately prove unenforceable. Continue reading →

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The Week the Fairness Doctrine Died

by on March 1, 2009 · 20 comments

TombstoneWhen the history books are finally written documenting America’s failed experiment with broadcast industry content regulation, this past week may go down as a critical moment in the story.  The obvious reason this week was so important was the Senate’s 87-11 vote on Thursday to prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine.  But an equally important development this past week was the release of a new white paper by the radical Leftist activist group Free Press.

The Free Press, which was founded by the socialist media theorist Robert McChesney, doesn’t typically publish many things admitting to the failures of coercive government regulation. Nonetheless, in “The Fairness Doctrine Distraction,” a paper by Josh Silver and Marvin Ammori, the media reformistas at Free Press told their Big Government comrades in Congress and academia that it was finally OK to let go of at least this one old pet project of theirs.  In their paper, Silver and Ammori note that, “The Fairness Doctrine put the federal government in the position of judging content and controlling speech” and “Reinstating the Doctrine will not result in greater viewpoint diversity in broadcasting.”  They continue:

The Fairness Doctrine, while originally well-intentioned, is not wise public policy. [T]he Doctrine places the FCC in charge of determining what is fair in political speech — a difficult task in the best of circumstances. Placing the government in the role of monitoring and judging political speech will inevitably produce controversy that is impossible to resolve.

I applaud the Free Press for finally fessing up to the Fairness Doctrine’s many failings.  This First Amendment-violating abomination should have never been allowed to be enforced by the FCC to begin with, but at least we can now all finally agree it should stay off the books for good.

Of course, the radicals at the (Un)Free Press weren’t about to let one of the Left’s old favorite regulations go so away without asking for something in return.  One of the reasons that Silver and Ammori are suddenly willing to give their blessing to the Doctrine’s burial is because they want to get on with the more far-reaching agenda of micro-managing media markets using a variety of less visible regulations.

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