Tech at Night: Don’t Break the Net

On August 31, 2014, in General, by Neil Stevens
Tech at Night

Don’t break the net by imposing a new, radical regulatory scheme. Internet access should not be a public utility. It has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. It would kill investment and expansion of high speed services to more people. More regulations hurt the little guy more than the big guy. Regulations hinder competition. Fast lanes become more likely. Netflix is just playing games to get a competitive advantage just like every other lobbying business. And once this gets in, FCC will go all out, the same way it always does.

This is a good site, covering a number of myths about the proposed Title II Reclassification, a dramatic step the radicals are pushing for the FCC to do, basically overturning a key concept of the bipartisan Telecommunications Act, and re-regulating the Internet as a phone service. It’s a terrible idea.

Here are some current events that illustrate why we shouldn’t trust the FCC with more power: Unions and other entrenched interests will try to keep it around even when it’s blatantly an anti-consumer subsidy like mandatory blackouts.

When an effort fails, such as Net Neutrality, they’ll just rename it and use whatever means necessary to keep arguing it, forever, independent of any previous arguments.

Federalism is often at risk, as in the case of FCC threatening arbitrarily to overturn state laws banning city-wide socialized Internet.

And naturally whenever FCC does get power, FCC will expand it, as in this case of the COPPA child privacy bill.


Prediction: Amazon does high bandwidth video and kills it, proving Netflix to be dishonest.

The Google-Obama ties continue to exist.

Cybersecurity is too important for government dominate, and also too fast moving for regulation to control.

Your words have consequences, even online. This is a case of a parent, but this is why kids don’t belong online unsupervised.

FCC is really bad at fairness.

Tor and Bitcoin remain the favorite tools of child abusers, and your tax dollars are likely helping fund Tor.

I don’t think Americans realize how much they’re spending on local channels on their Cable bills, in the form of “Retransmission Consent” fees. They just blame the cable companies even though it’s not their fault. And guess what? These fees are caused by regulation. That’s why I support the Local Choice bill, which lets individual customers decide which fees they want to pay, and which local channels they want.

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