Net Neutrality: Don’t Let the Nipplegate People (FCC) Regulate the Internet!

When the Federal Communications Commission
released its proposal last week about net neutrality, the
conversation was largely between people defending the right of the
agency that brought us Nipplegate to increase its regulation of the
Internet and people calling for the FCC to totally regulate the
business operations of Internet service providers (ISPs). That’s
not a debate: It’s a clusterfuck that in the name of preserving all
that is good and holy about the Internet would give federal
bureaucrats a huge amount of say-so in the one place it hasn’t been
able to totally screw up.

My latest
Daily Beast column argues to keep the FCC as far away
from the Internet as possible. Snippets:

Reports of the imminent death of the Internet’s freewheeling
ways and utopian possibilities are more wildly exaggerated and full
of spam than those emails from Mrs. Mobotu Sese-Seko.

In fact, the real problem isn’t that the FCC hasn’t shown the
cyber-cojones to regulate ISPs like an old-school
telephone company or “common carrier,” but that it’s trying to
increase its regulatory control of the Internet in the first
place.

Under the proposal currently in
play, the FCC assumes an increased ability to review ISP offerings
on a “case-by-case basis” and kill any plan it doesn’t believe is
“commercially reasonable.” Goodbye fast-moving innovation and
adjustment to changing technology on the part of companies, hello
regulatory morass and long, drawn-out bureaucratic hassles….

I don’t trust the good intentions or dedication to high
principle of my local cable company any more than I trust my local
congressman with the same. But I trust the FCC even less,
especially given the
proposed rules’ reliance on vague terms such
as commercially reasonable and the promise to
adjudicate interventions on a case-by-case basis. At best, it’s a
slow-moving government agency with a proven record of clamping down
on free expression, attempting to expand its power, and trying to
stymie technological innovation. The less power it has to cover the
Internet like it tried to cover Janet Jackson’s right breast, the
better off we will all be.

Read the whole thing.

Reason
on Net Neutrality.