Thursday’s historic vote by the Federal Communications Commission to reclassify
broadband was not the first but merely the latest step toward regulating speech. The FCC voted to no longer classify broadband as a Title I entity (of the Communications Act) but instead as a Title II entity, like common carriers such as telephone service. The commission’s three Democrats approved the change over the dissent of the agency’s two Republican commissioners.
Anyone who believes this vote was about preserving a free and open Internet as so-called “net neutrality” supporters have claimed has not been paying close attention. One only has to revisit statements and actions undertaken by Administration officials in the last several years to understand the end-game.
President Barack Obama’s first-term chairman of the FCC was former Harvard Law School classmate, Julius Genachowski. Genachowski directed a multi-pronged effort aimed at increasing government control of news, information, and entertainment.
The FCC’s ill-conceived National Broadband Plan, was the first round in moving electronic media (the dominant form of information distribution) from other platforms (e.g. broadcast) to broadband.
The goal, claimed Genachowski, was to make the spectrum occupied by television broadcasters available to other wireless platforms such as cellular telephones. That was merely the excuse. By virtue of the broadband reclassification vote, the regulatory light touch of the Internet, which allowed it flourish in the past couple of decades, was abandoned in favor of the heavy-hand of government regulation.
Perhaps to mollify critics, the agency’s Democratic commissioners insist they will exclude Internet service providers from some of the other Title II regulatory burdens placed on telephony.
Does anyone truly believe DC politicians will resist the urge to extract billions of dollars in payments from Internet service providers as they currently do with telephony in order feed the Universal Service Fund? The USF was a reelection windfall for Obama. It was used as a slush fund to hand-out the notoriously nicknamed “Obama phones” to low-income voters. About 2.2 billion dollars in Obama phones were given away in 2012.
Read the rest:
Net Neutrality Is About Regulating Speech | The American Spectator
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