President Obama has embraced the principle of “net neutrality,” meaning that internet providers shouldn’t charge some big-content providers more than others. Towards that end, the President wants to regulate the internet like any other utility. As opposed to just tailoring a specific and limited regulation dealing with the issue. He wants to take over the whole online universe, using a public-utility law written in 1934.
From Michael Mandel, Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet would do more harm than good – The Washington Post:
President Obama’s call this week to regulate the Internet as a public utility is like pushing to replace the engine of a car that runs perfectly well. The U.S. data sector — including wired and wireless broadband — is the envy of the world, administering a powerful boost to consumer welfare, generating high-paying jobs and encouraging tens of billions of dollars in corporate investment. Indeed, the prices of data-related goods and services have dropped by almost 20 percent since 2007.
Putting the Federal Communications Commission in charge of regulating broadband rates and micromanaging Web services, as the president proposes, would slow innovation and raise costs. It would be bad news for the economy. It would also be a serious misstep for the Democratic Party, marking a retreat from market-based, pro-competition policies pioneered by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
The issue here is how best to ensure an open Internet, in which big and small companies alike have unfettered access to customers. After the courts threw out the old open Internet rules in January, virtually all concerned parties agreed the United States needed strong regulations to prevent blocking or discrimination online, to require real transparency for network-management policies by Internet service providers and to ban paid prioritization that could divide the Internet into fast-lane “haves” and slow-lane “have-nots.”
The debate is over the best policy road to take in enacting these rules. One path — using Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — would allow the FCC to enact strong rules and penalize Internet service providers who impede anyone’s access to the bounty of the Web, while preserving the freedom to innovate and deploy new technologies.
The other road — which relies on Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 — would resuscitate decades-old public-utility regulations and enable the FCC (and a new layer of state agencies) to regulate prices and micromanage Internet services. This is the road back in time that the president endorsed.
Or do you think preventing net neutrality is itself a dangerous violation of the free market and the dynamics of the internet? Read what possible Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has to say about this.
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