Here’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s sober take on the Google-Verizon net neutrality proposal. In a nutshell, they think that Googlezon has a couple of interesting ideas in the proposal, but the wired neutrality portion is “troubling” and wireless is a flat-out “fail”.
One thing that the EFF addresses but that I haven’t mentioned in my seemingly endless series of posts on this topic is that the FCC itself shouldn’t be given the role of an all-powerful central scrutinizer:
Those who have followed EFF’s position on net neutrality will know that, while we strongly support neutrality in practice, we are opposed to open-ended grants of regulatory authority to the FCC. On that score, the Google/Verizon proposal takes a promising new approach. It would limit the FCC to case-by-case enforcement of consumer protection and nondiscrimination requirements and prohibit broad rulemaking. In essence, it tries to limit the FCC to the type of authority that the FTC has — the authority to investigate claims as they are made.
This limitation, if enforced, could help avoid many of the problems we’ve been concerned about, such as the possibility that a future FCC might decide to take on the role of “Internet indecency” police or, as a result of regulatory capture, might become an innovation gatekeeper, blocking new ideas by small innovators in order to protect the interests of big dinosaurs.
(Thanks to emailer Tim.)
Mark S.
I don’t like Googlezon. Verigle? Goozon?
Adam Lang
Thus in practice limiting the FCC’s authority to infractions of net neutrality that are so obvious and blatant that they must be noticed, and which are complained about by a large company.
Because, as we’ve seen with this kind of case-by-case basis thing in telemarketing, even if you are called up to 20 times a day by a robocaller, to the point where you can no longer use your telephone and have to get a new number, all they will do about it is take your name and address and add you to a list somewhere.
And of course, if a cable company decides that the traffic for their web sites should be prioritized over the traffic for their competitors’ web sites, who is going to know? The competitor could be loading slowly for any one of a number of reasons.
Worse than useless, guys.
burnspbesq
Entirely apart from the fact that that’s not what the law is, or has been for almost 80 years, the proposal to hamstring the FCC looks like it came out of the Grover Norquist Playbook.
So, the regulator can only chase the fox after the all the chickens have been stolen and the henhouse has been burned to the ground?
With all due respect to the EFF, which is on the right side far more often than not, fuck that. If they want me to believe that 77 years of the FCC regulating the public airwaves in the public interest has been 77 years of Charlie Foxtrot, they’d better bring some evidence.
Zifnab
The problem, as I see it, isn’t that the FCC might have too much power or too little power, but that the FCC might become corrupt in the same way that the MMS became corrupt.
In that case, the solution isn’t to make the FCC weaker or more limited in scope. Weakening the FCC just hands the authority over to someone else – either another regulatory agency or the service providers we’re trying to protect ourselves from to begin with.
I think the real solution has to be very strict and well-enforced anti-corruption rules that bind who can server on the board of the FCC. Get the same rules we have for Congressmen out there. You can’t get a corporate job for X years after you leave office. You can’t take gifts. You can’t go on trips. Etc. Etc.
You’ve got to draw a hard line between public service and private practice. Otherwise, you’re never going to see an end to this kind of corruption.
RareSanity
I usually respect the EFF, but, this is asinine.
It is perfectly reasonable to empower the FCC to enforce the means by which information is transported and specifically bar them from censoring the content of that information.
This is the same thing that happens with land mobile radio (like public safety systems) frequency licensing. Licensees are required to only transmit on their frequencies and not cause interference on others. Along with various other rules regarding the transmission of radio signals. However, there are no rules to what can be said on those frequencies.
13th Generation
@mistermix
I like your posts almost as much as DougJ’s, FWIW. Sorry you can’t get more people to bite on this issue, not political enough for this blog I guess. I do think it’s a very important topic, keep up the fight.
Bill Murray
I’m pretty much with Adam Lang here. Is the EFF run by a bunch of libertarians?
burnspbesq
@Zifnab:
As someone who went from private practice to government (IRS Office of Chief Counsel) and back again, I’m going to push back on this. The revolving door is a good thing – it allows the government to hire highly competent people who are making an investment in their long-term career prospects (foregoing current comp to enhance their future value to employers) by gaining an understanding of how government works that they can later use on behalf of clients. If someone crosses certain well-understood lines, they commit a felony and if they get caught they go to jail.
The laws you are advocating for already exist. Check out 18 USC sections 205 and 207.
You may have missed the colloquy I had with Yutsano (who is joining the IRS next month) about the “Robert Rodriguez video.” Rodriguez is a former IRS agent who got caught taking bribes to compromise audits. As a condition of getting a favorable sentencing recommendation, he agreed to make a training video for the IRS. Even with said sentencing recommendation, he got 15 years in jail and civilly forfeited pretty much everything he owned. That’s why government employees generally don’t cross the lines.