A Guide to Network Neutrality Cherry-Picking, Telecom Style

[Commentary] In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, big telecommunications carriers write "[J]ust when regulatory certainty is most needed to keep the private-enterprise engine running in high gear, some parties advocate abandoning the current Title I model in favor of public-utility-type regulation under Title II. Robert McChesney, the co-founder of Free Press and a current member of its Board, articulated that group's radical agenda in an interview with the Socialist Project."

The companies throwing out some quasi-patriotic red meat. They pair up "regulatory certainty" and "private-enterprise engine" with "public-utility-type regulation" and, horrors, the "radical agenda" as expressed in an interview with a Web site that includes the word, "Socialist" in its title.

Another way of looking at this appalling parallel construction is to ask some questions. How can there be "regulatory certainty" when the biggest Internet Service Provider in the country (Comcast) has taken these very FCC principles to court, and may yet win? Answer: There isn't. And you can bet that any time the FCC in the future wants to use its vague regulatory principles to regulate, one or another of the Big Telecom Ecosphere will rush its lawyers off to the courthouse to challenge it.

And the high gear in which the "private enterprise engine" is supposedly running? Free Press has done some impressive economic work tracking telephone company spending on its network. Guess what? It goes up and it goes down, depending on company policy, not on regulatory policy. And spending on the network has gone down. Must have slipped a gear there.

As for "public-utility" regulation? They make that sound like a bad thing, when it doesn't have to be that bad. Of course, for the big telephone and cable companies, any regulation is bad, which is why they are playing that little shell game at the FCC ­ saying don't do that "public utility regulation" and challenging whether other regulation will apply. The companies know better. They know that the FCC has a lot of discretion of what to regulate and how to regulate it. They know this because they gamed the system to take advantage of the laxity. You can't avoid that entirely. But what you can avoid is a situation in which the FCC has no authority at all ­ the ultimate goal of Big Telecom.

And the "radical agenda"? Fact is, that until 2005, Internet access services were regulated the way they should have been, the way most telecom services had been for years. The "radical agenda" was the little switcheroo the FCC played, taking Internet access out of the direct authority of the Commission. Some of us want to return things to the way they were, and for that we're labeled radical. War Is Peace, you know?