If they are not, the FCC’s new Net Neutrality rules sound awfully like price fixing, or a kind of Internet Civil Rights Act, where everyone must be allowed access to everything without discrimination based on, well, what and how much you purchase.
Ruled by regulators we certainly are.
Article I, Section 1, of the United States Constitution, provides that:
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
So what is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doing regulating the Internet? Nothing out of the ordinary is the answer. The FCC is just doing what all America’s extra-Constitutional government agencies do: manage all aspects of American life. Hence the term “The Managerial State.”
ROBERT M. MCDOWELL, a Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, calls the FCC’s unconstitutional power grab a “jaw-dropping interventionist chutzpah”; a bypasses of “branches of our government in the dogged pursuit of needless and harmful regulation.”
Let us not forget that the Net Neutrality odyssey began with that bastard Bush. As Wired reports, “In 2005, then-FCC chairman Michael Powell issued a set of principles, the so-called Four Freedoms, which said that internet users had the right to use the lawful software and services they want to on the internet, access their choice of content, use whatever devices they like, and get meaningful information about how their online service plan works.”
Note the Bush boy’s UN-like language: “Four Freedoms.”
This is important: “Both wireless and fixed broadband service providers will have to explain how they manage congestion on their networks. Cable and DSL companies will have to let you use the applications, online services and devices that you want to. Meanwhile, wireless companies will be prohibited from blocking websites and internet telephony services like Skype. Cable and DSL providers would be barred from ‘unreasonably’ discriminating against various online services.”
An Internet Civil Rights Act of sorts.
The one thing that bothers me is this: Is Comcast, for example, not a franchise (“a privilege or right officially granted a person or a group by a government”)? The kind of areal monopoly they enjoy and less-than-optimal service they provide in the market seems to suggest that possibility.
Franchise status might also explain why, as Wired observed, “There was one group … which seemed content with the new rules: the nation’s cable and telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. They’ve been making the rounds in recent weeks signaling their support for Chairman Julius Genachowski’s compromise deal.”
UPDATE (Dec. 22): GREAT MINDS. Michelle Malkin also finds Civil Rights language to be the appropriate source of metaphor to describe the impetus of laws that’ll mandate equal Internet access to all irrespective of the cost of a product or service.
Under the FCC’s new regime, the market will be fattened and socialized and the price system sundered. This means worse service for all paying customers as the incentive to innovate are removed. When will Out “Overlords Who Art in DC” UNDERSTAND that the price and profit system is the key to prosperity? The correct answer is “never.”
Undaunted promoters of Obama FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s “open Internet” plan to expand regulatory authority over the Internet have couched their online power grab in the rhetoric of civil rights. On Monday, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps proclaimed: “Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right…[though] not many people have talked about it that way.” Opposing the government Internet takeover blueprint, in other words, is tantamount to supporting segregation. Cunning propaganda, that.
“Broadband is becoming a basic necessity,” civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks added. And earlier this month, fellow FCC panelist Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Congressional Black Caucus leader and Number Three House Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina, declared that free (read: taxpayer-subsidized) access to the Internet is not only a civil right for every “nappy-headed child” in America, but essential to their self-esteem. Every minority child, she said, “deserves to be not only connected, but to be proud of who he or she is.”