Tag: Title II

Posted on By Richard T. Kaplar

Net Neutrality: How Did We Get Here and Where Are We Going?

It’s hard to imagine an issue in today’s media/telecom policy universe that has sparked more controversy or inspired more passion than the innocuous-sounding Net Neutrality. How could such a seemingly simple concept – that Internet access should be open to everyone and that services should be provided on a neutral basis without discrimination by type, price, speed, or quality – create such a firestorm?

One need look no further than the cover of this edition of Inside the FCC for the answer, or at least a major clue: “The Pros and Cons of Internet Regulation.” Many advocates of Net Neutrality believe this goal can’t be achieved without the regulatory hand of government exerting its grip on the Internet – and the more forcefully, the better. In contrast, other advocates of Net Neutrality believe it is a goal best achieved through the workings of the marketplace, and point to the successful operation of the Internet for years prior to any regulation.

Continue reading “Net Neutrality: How Did We Get Here and Where Are We Going?”

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The Enduring Threat of Net Neutrality

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H.L. Mencken

No regulatory issue in memory has been quite like that of “net neutrality.” A solution in search of a problem, bankrolled and of early and particular economic benefit to two companies, and a regulation that threatens to give government sway over an industry where it had none before, network neutrality by regulation defies logic, history, and the way the world works. Other than that it’s one terrific idea.

Net neutrality was conjured up by an alliance of left-wing activists, Democratic commissioners of the FCC, and certain Internet companies and their trade associations. The regulations that followed have been on a devolutionary path, such that what was merely bad (net neutrality under Title I) became, in 2015, very much worse – net neutrality under Title II. Continue reading “The Enduring Threat of Net Neutrality”

Posted on By Robert M. McDownell, Esq.

Title II Places Global Internet Freedom in Jeopardy

By guest blogger ROBERT M. McDOWELL, partner at Wiley Rein LLP in Washington, D.C.  Former FCC commissioner McDowell is chairman of The Media Institute’s Global Internet Freedom Advisory Council.

In February, the Federal Communications Commission reversed decades of bipartisan consensus on America’s foreign policy for the Internet when it adopted new “open Internet” rules.  These sweeping new regulations undermine America’s ability to resist increased government control of the Internet internationally, thus placing global Internet freedom and prosperity in jeopardy.

Proponents of more Internet regulation argued that “the strongest possible” laws were needed to prevent Internet service providers, such as cable and phone companies, from acting in anticompetitive ways and harming consumers by, say, blocking selected Web destinations.  Their solution?  Imposing regulations designed for the Ma Bell phone monopoly on 21st-century technology by declaring the Internet a public utility under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.  After unprecedented pressure from the White House and net neutrality activists, the FCC abandoned a more moderate approach in favor of Title II classification.

It is important to remember that this represented a stunning reversal of the policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations.  Both presidencies rejected regulating the Internet like a public utility – domestically or internationally – instead adopting a highly successful “hands-off” approach.   The result: The Internet is the greatest global deregulation success story of all time.

Despite the long-held policy against subjecting the Internet to telephone-style regulations, the FCC’s imposition of more than 1,000 new regulations under Title II – including the power to set “rates, terms, and conditions,” will serve to legitimize international efforts to expand government control of the Internet as well.  With America’s bargaining power regarding the issue of Internet freedom weakened as a result, countries like Russia and China may encounter less resistance to increased multilateral authority over the Net.

Furthermore, the FCC’s new rules could have tangible consequences for America’s existing treaty obligations.  For example, defining the Internet as a phone network may trigger expanded jurisdiction over the Web through existing treaties of the International Telecommunication Union, a regulatory arm of the United Nations.  In reaction to similar proposals in 1998, President Clinton’s FCC chairman, William Kennard, presciently said that “classifying Internet access services as telecommunications services could have significant consequences for the global development of the Internet.”

In 2012 at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), the United States led a coalition of 55 nations that refused to sign a global treaty that would presume new authority to regulate disparate aspects of the Internet.  Now, however, with more government intrusion into this space at home, maintaining such global coalitions in the future will become increasingly more difficult.

Another potential consequence of the FCC’s rules is an unintended encouragement of intergovernmental rules to impose “sending party pays” fees for international Internet traffic that terminates on networks owned by foreign phone companies.  Such a plan was put forward in 2012 by a handful of European phone companies and ITU member states.  Fortunately, the plan was rejected, as the Unites States and others recognized it would increase costs for consumers as Internet content and app companies would have to pay fees – as a matter of international law – that would be passed on to all Internet users.

Additionally, China continues to advance a proposal to make a special committee of the U.N. General Assembly the dominant body to determine global Internet governance.  Meanwhile, Russia has joined China in sponsoring an “international code of conduct for information security” at the U.N. that would authorize Internet censorship and enshrine multilateral state control of the global network.  These countries have many client states that would support them in a one-country-one-vote treaty adoption.

This week, many of these same countries will be advocating their vision of the Internet’s future at a major international conference at U.N. headquarters in New York.  Global multilateral oversight and regulation of the Internet is their goal.  Included in the written submissions preceding the conference is a proposal by China, and members of the G-77 group of developing countries, calling on member states to reject use of the Internet for “subversive” or “political” purposes.

Also this week, China hosts the Second World Internet Conference.  With government leaders from Russia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan – among others – in attendance, the purported goal of the conference is to promote “an interconnected world shared and governed by all.”  At the conference, China will continue to push for “Internet sovereignty,” a vision for Internet governance that threatens to fundamentally transform the Internet from a truly international information sharing platform, to a compartmentalized series of intranets heavily regulated by governments.

By reversing decades of bipartisan agreement to limit Internet regulation, the FCC has created an irreconcilable contradiction between America’s domestic and foreign policies.  Unfortunately, the cause of an open and freedom-enhancing global Internet will suffer as a result.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The First Amendment and Free Speech Under Assault

If you’re not alarmed by the assault on the First Amendment and free speech generally, you’re not paying attention.

Consider the list of offenses committed by the government.  They range, in recent times, from the Department of Justice’s spying on the phone records of reporters at the Associated Press, to the National Security Administration’s domestic call tracking, and from the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofit organizations, to the suggestion by the ranking Democrat on the Federal Elections Commission that political speech on the Internet should be regulated.

Other examples include the Obama Administration’s resistance to Freedom of Information Act requests, as documented in a study by the AP, and the issuance, by the CIA, of a subpoena to James Risen of the New York Times, demanding the identity of one of his confidential sources.

The party-line passage, by the Federal Communications Commission, of its so-called “Net Neutrality” regulations is another example.  In addition to inaugurating the regulation of the formerly unregulated Internet, the Title II approach adopted is certain, as FCC Commissioner Pai has warned, to open the door to attempts to use this regulation for purposes that, both intended and unintended, undermine free speech.

The most recent example of governmental speech suppression is the subpoena served on the online version of Reason magazine by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.  The subpoena, which for a time came with a gag order, demanded to know the identity of a handful of commenters that, angry about the life sentence handed down to the founder of the drug trading site, Silk Road, wrote denunciations of the judge who presided over the trial.

An example of one of the comments that occasioned the U.S. Attorney’s subpoena for the identification of that commenter: “I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman.”

So there it is.  Your taxpayer dollars at work!  And not just by a few bureaucrats, but by a veritable army of them: DOJ, NSA, CIA, IRS, FEC, FCC.  As Everett Dirksen might have put it, an agency here and an agency there, and pretty soon you’re talking about some real government.

Making matters worse and infinitely more depressing is the assault on free speech being committed by people wielding the bludgeon of political correctness, a concept that from the beginning symbolized the very opposite of free speech.

The venues of choice for the PC speech police are mainly the media (social media especially) and college campuses, and 2014 was a banner year for such stuff.

Take, for instance, the petition generated by two “climate change” groups in February of last year.  Having collected 110,000 names, the groups demanded that the Washington Post stop publishing “editorial content denying climate change.”  The Post refused, but the Los Angeles Times happily adopted a policy that was similar to what the groups were demanding.

And then, of course, there are the campuses.  Last year’s examples of campus “disinvitation” campaigns against speakers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Condoleeza Rice, and Christine Lagarde have been widely chronicled, but the beat goes on.

In its 2015 Spotlight on Speech Codes, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) found that 54 percent of some 400 public colleges and universities it sampled maintain speech codes that violate the First Amendment.

FIRE’s response to this state of affairs has been to create a free speech litigation program that threatens offending colleges and universities with legal action, and the organization has had some notable successes.  But it’s doubtful that legal action alone will put the brakes on a concept that’s never depended on the law for its foundational principles or propagation.

Incubated on campus by activists and ideologues, and disseminated through the media, half-baked theories like “white privilege” and “microaggressions” and practices like “trigger warnings” and “speech codes” need to be challenged in those same venues by arguments based on logic, history, and science.

Absent this, and without congressional action to rein in the out-of-control federal agencies, free speech in the United States is at risk of becoming a dead letter; extant in the Constitution but without force or meaning.

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils. 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The FCC’s Wheeler of Fortune

LAS VEGAS – Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler’s speech yesterday to broadcasters attending the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Show here dealt primarily with broadcast-specific subjects.  But as expected, he also used the occasion to tout the Commission’s new Open Internet Order, arguing that broadcasters should support it because, like the must-carry rules, the order “assures that your use of the Internet will be free from the risk of discrimination or hold-up by a gatekeeper.”

To characterize this claim as 100-proof claptrap would be to understate the case.  Put simply, no Internet service provider has, or would have, the tiniest interest in discriminating against anything broadcasters might want to put online.  Indeed, net neutrality is widely embraced by the phone and cable companies.

The real issue is the way in which the FCC – through Title II regulation – proposes to define and enforce net neutrality in the future.

Much has been said about the inefficiencies and investment-reducing effects of Title II regulation, and most all of it is true.  But the less-well-discussed aspect is the potential in it for activist groups and ideologues like Free Press and kindred organizations to exploit this order in attempts to impose certain types of content controls.  >> Read More

Posted on By Patrick Maines

‘Forbearing’ the Constitution: Net Neutrality and the FCC

So the latest word is that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a branch of government that, amusingly, is still referred to as an “independent” agency, is about to enact so-called net neutrality regulations under Title II of the Communications Act.

This, because according to its fans at the Commission, such regulations are needed in order to ensure a “fair and open” Internet.  Because, however, even the most passionate among them understand the many problems this would otherwise cause, the majority Democratic commissioners are said to be poised to enact regulations that forbear the full imposition of Title ll rules.

Meantime, Congress is considering enacting a law that would itself aim to protect net neutrality, but would do so in such a way as to deprive the FCC of its ability to regulate Internet service providers as a utility under Title II.

If (you’ll forgive the expression) one googles the word “forbearance,” the first definition that comes up reads: “The action of refraining from exercising a legal right…. ” — and there’s the rub!

With every passing day it becomes clearer that the Internet is the future of the press, and the plain language of the First Amendment bars the government from abridging freedom of speech or of the press.  >>Read More

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Shedding Light on Title II and the First Amendment

Now that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has proposed what Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton artfully calls a “Title II Lite” approach to broadband regulation, it’s a good time to take a second look (or maybe your first) at a recent paper by Robert Corn-Revere.

Bob wrote a Perspectives policy paper for The Media Institute titled “Defining Away the First Amendment,” which we released May 4.

This noted First Amendment attorney makes a crucial point – but a point that has not received adequate attention: “The FCC’s current ability to change the level of First Amendment protection for a medium simply by changing its regulatory definition is quite limited, if not nonexistent.”

Whoa, you mean there’s a First Amendment dimension to this reclassification debate?  You’d never know it by listening to the FCC, or to “net neutrality” supporters like Free Press.  Maybe that’s not surprising, since the First Amendment could very well prove an unwelcome stumbling block for Chairman Genachowski and his net-neutrality ilk.  Easier for them just to ignore it.

But, I would suggest to you, the First Amendment is far too important to ignore here.  In his issue paper, Bob Corn-Revere has shed some much-needed light on a pivotal concern that the FCC has tried to keep in the shadows.  Taking a “lite” approach to Title II reclassification doesn’t absolve the FCC of its constitutional obligations.  If anything, we need more “light” from Bob and others who are willing to hold the FCC accountable for the First Amendment ramifications of its regulatory agenda.