So let’s review:
The Internet revolution has brought us a level of innovation and prosperity unprecedented in human history.
Throughout two decades spanning both the Clinton and Bush administrations, deregulation has provided the fertile ground for private investment and productivity measured not in the billions, or even hundreds of billions, but in the trillions.
On that basis, the public opposes federal Internet regulation by a two-to-one margin.
Further, a unanimous D.C. Court of Appeals rejected Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authority to impose “Net Neutrality” just eight months ago.
Finally, a rare bipartisan coalition of 300 members of the House and Senate have admonished the FCC against its rogue “Net Neutrality” scheme.
So what does the unelected FCC do? Learning nothing from the Administration’s ObamaCare fiasco, it moves full speed ahead with its hyperpartisan “Net Neutrality” agenda by a party-line 3-2 vote anyway. As dissenting (i.e., sober) FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker summarizes, the FCC’s intervention threatens the future of the Internet:
The rules will give government, for the first time, a substantive role in how the Internet will be operated and managed, how broadband services will be priced and structured, and potentially how broadband networks will be financed. By replacing market forces and technological solutions with bureaucratic oversight, we may see an Internet future not quite as bright as we need, with less investment, less innovation and more congestion. Discouragingly, the FCC is intervening to regulate the Internet because it wants to, not because it needs to.”
The FCC’s reckless effort to regulate Internet traffic will now begin a slow death march to ultimate defeat from legal challenges and Congressional action. In the meantime, unfortunately, the cost will be even more uncertainty at a time when our economy cannot afford it.
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