Freedom Line Blog

(1)  Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Representatives Fred Upton (R – Texas) and Greg Walden (R – Oregon) on how the Obama Administration continues to “put the brakes on business,” including FCC red tape and regulatory uncertainty:

On Sept. 26, the Federal Communications Commission adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking outlining potential new media-ownership rules that eliminate the so-called UHF discount.  The change would affect how the FCC determines whether a station owner has approached a 39% cap on nationwide audience that can be reached by a single owner.  The proposed FCC rules aren’t just complicated.  They won’t even be final until next year at the earliest because the FCC can take however long it sees fit—sometimes more than a decade—to promulgate rules.  Even worse, the commission says whatever rules the FCC dreams up in the future will be applied retroactively.  So between now and when the new guidelines become final, no one knows the rules of the game.  And companies have to be prepared at all times to adhere to a new set of regulations that are still a glimmer in the FCC’s eye.  This leaves one of the economy’s only flourishing industries at the mercy of bureaucrats in Washington.”

(2) From The Washington Post, encouraging analysis entitled “How the FCC Plans to Clear the Air for More Mobile Data”:

To fix the coming crunch, federal regulators think they’ve come up with the right solution: Give companies like Verizon and AT&T a lot more frequencies on the wireless spectrum to play with. But where will all those extra channels come from? That’s where the television industry comes in. If all goes according to plan, next year hundreds of TV stations will get a big check to shut down operations and give up their spectrum. Then the agency will turn around and sell that invisible treasure to the wireless companies so that when you fire up your data connection, you won’t get caught in an online traffic jam. All told, the FCC hopes to take about 20 channels worth of spectrum that are currently licensed to various TV stations across the country and auction them off to the wireless companies in various local markets.”

(3) From Jim Kohlenberger writing at GigaOM, a clarion call to free much-needed spectrum for commercial wireless use:

To advance the emerging connected device revolution, we need to continue to free up spectrum for commercial wireless use, and accelerate the transition to IP networks.  At GigaOM’s Mobilize conference on October 16, I’ll be talking about some of the ways we can do this.  President Obama has already taken important steps to make more spectrum available and accelerate the transition to faster and more capable next-generation IP-based wireless LTE networks.  It is absolutely essential that we continue to invest and upgrade our next-generation networks today in order to keep pace with innovation and meet the wireless demands of consumers and businesses tomorrow.”

(4) From Bloomberg, a report on FCC observers’ recommendations for quick action if and when its new commissioners are confirmed:

Once confirmed, the new chairman of the FCC should spell out the agency’s perspective on the issues facing the modern telecommunications sector, industry analysts said Oct. 15 at a panel hosted by the Technology Policy Institute.  The FCC should ‘take a look at where the industry is today, [ask] what are the challenges ahead, is there a role for regulation in that, what is it and how should we, in fact, plan for that?’  Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior vice president of external and legislative affairs, said Oct. 15.  This requires the FCC to ‘modernize its approach and its outlook and, frankly, modernize some of its regulations,’ he said. Cicconi said he believes the FCC has an oversight role as telecommunications companies and customers migrate from wired copper telephone networks to IP-based networks.  AT&T has a pending proposal with the commission to coordinate tests at wireline facilities which would replace their time-division multiplexed facilities with IP-based alternatives.

Cicconi urged the FCC to avoid setting spectrum caps that would prevent larger carriers from bidding on certain bands in the upcoming incentive auction. ‘The notion of setting artificial limits seem purely designed to advantage one set of companies and disadvantage another,’ he said. AT&T isn’t against ‘something that is set up to be even-handed,’ Cicconi said.  ‘I think it is possible to do that with the current spectrum screen.'”

(5) From the State Telephone Regulation Report, a story on calls for fewer obstructive regulation from the FCC as we move forward in the IP transition:

Fewer regulations are needed by states and the FCC to promote competition and to move the IP transition forward, said speakers at the Telecommunications Summit at Murray State University in Kentucky Oct. 9.  The deregulation of telecom services by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission helped to spread investment and innovation in the state by AT&T and Comcast, said Commissioner Larry Landis.  State commissions have the opportunity to work with the FCC to change policies in the states, said Landis:  ‘States have a unique perspective to bring to the process, and they understand the need to share a vision as well as each having their own.’  The IP transition is a multi-year change that doesn’t need to be hampered by FCC regulation before the technologies are fully developed, said Hank Hultquist, AT&T vice president-federal regulatory.  ‘IP is a remarkably flexible protocol that allows you to operate different technologies on the same network.’  IP does provide some solutions to old technologies that will take time to adopt, said Hultquist.  Some customers were upset that Verizon deployed Voice Link as the sole service in Fire Island, N.Y., because it did not have faxing capability, he said.  ‘You can do faxing with scanning, but I’m skeptical that this should be handled in the transition or the network,’ because increasingly scanning can take the place of sending faxes, he said.  It will also take time to make sure IP interconnection works, said Hultquist.  ‘We don’t want to replicate problems.’  Rural providers are concerned about the IP transition because they base revenue on long-distance calls, which would cost them money on IP networks, said Hultquist.  ‘The revenue flow would go away and these providers want a way to resolve that.'”

(6) From The Hill, an update on confirmation hearings for FCC and FTC nominees ready to proceed:

The Senate could confirm President Obama’s nominees to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission as early as Wednesday night.  Tom Wheeler, President Obama’s pick for FCC chairman, and Michael O’Rielly, a nominee for a Republican commission seat, have been placed on a fast track for Senate approval, according to a document circulated on Capitol Hill Wednesday.  The confirmations would likely come after the Senate votes on a deal to lift the debt ceiling and end the government shutdown on Wednesday night.  The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee approved Wheeler’s nomination by a voice vote in July.  O’Rielly and McSweeny testified before the panel last month, but the committee hasn’t voted on either nomination.  Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has indicated he might block Wheeler’s nomination unless he promised not to require more disclosure about the groups paying for political advertisements.”

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT:  Troy Senik, CFIF Fellow and Senior Editor at Ricochet – Infighting in the GOP in the wake of the shutdown and the disastrous ObamaCare rollout;

4:30 CDT/5:30 EDT:  Romina Boccia, Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs at The Heritage Foundation – How Federal Spending and Government Waste Affect Economic Growth;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT:  Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security – Cybersecurity Vulnerabilties; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT:  Sam Kazman, General Counsel of Competitive Enterprise Institute and Head of Death by Regulation Project – ObamaCare in Federal Court over Illegitimate IRS Penalties.

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

If you bribe male prostitutes in Mexico City to wear condoms, will they remain free of sexually transmitted infections?

The federal government is using your tax dollars to find out.

Sadly, I’m not kidding.

Since 2011, the taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health has squandered $398,213 on giveaways to Brown University to determine whether male prostitutes in Mexico are less likely to obtain a sexually transmitted infection if they receive a cash handout for remaining infection-free.

The study takes 300 male prostitutes in Mexico City, ages 18-25, and divides them into three groups. The first group receives a bonus of 500 pesos every six months if they test negative for sexually transmitted infections, the second group snags 200 pesos and the third group gets no incentive for testing clean (but it would seem that not having a sexually transmitted infection would be incentive enough).

All 300 prostitutes receive 170 pesos a year just for being in the study.

If the study finds that bribing male prostitutes in Mexico is effective at increasing condom usage and reducing sexually transmitted infections, then what? Will U.S. taxpayers be on the hook for regular incentive payments to all Mexican prostitutes?

At a time when the federal government is hiking taxes, raising its debt ceiling and drowning in ever-deepening debt, the last thing Washington needs to do is ship our money to Mexico City to give a cash reward to prostitutes for not catching Chlamydia or Gonorrhea. But that’s not stopping them.

A school district in Oconomowoc, Wis., recently celebrated the achievements of a new program for special-needs students. Unfortunately, the staff responsible for helping those special-needs students succeed are seeing their hours cut dramatically thanks to Obamacare.

Investor’s Business Daily reports the school district would face a $1.5 million hit due to the Affordable Care Act’s employer insurance requirements if it didn’t slash the work hours of the paraprofessional staff.

“Instead of one full-time paraprofessional working a full day; one part-time paraprofessional would work the morning half of the day, while a second part-time paraprofessional would work the afternoon portion of the day,” the district told parents.

More than 100 school districts across America have already cut support such as teacher aides, bus drivers and cafeteria workers to avoid massive Obamacare-related costs, according to Investor’s Business Daily.

We already knew that Obamacare harms the economy, reduces the quality of available healthcare and limits choice. Sadly, the scheme also interferes with the ability of school districts to provide a quality education to our children.

A Denver news station uncovered that six Colorado-based employees from the Office of Natural Resources Revenue spent more than $13,000 in Las Vegas “to attend a fraud investigators conference in June even though a similar conference offered by the Colorado fraud investigator’s chapter was planned for Denver.”

The federal employees claimed they stuck taxpayers with the bill for their pricey Las Vegas getaway because they needed continuing education credits offered at the event. However, NBC affiliate 9News found that the continuing education credits could have been attained at the Colorado conference for a small fraction of the cost of the Vegas vacation.

But what fun is staying in Colorado when you can force taxpayers to send you to Vegas?

The cost to taxpayers skyrocketed because many of the attendees waited until the last minute to book their flights and insisted on staying in Vegas an extra day to vacation after the conference ended – all using tax dollars.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Dan Epstein, Executive Director of Cause of Action, discusses the risks Americans face in disclosing their personal medical and financial information on the ObamaCare exchanges and the risk of waste, fraud and abuse of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars states are receiving to run their exchanges.

Listen to the interview here.

Adding to the parade of horribles attending the Obamacare rollout that Ashton mentions below is this fact: the websites are inconvenient to consumers because — unlike virtually any other e-commerce transaction — you have to build an account and start submitting personal information before you are so much as allowed to browse your possible options. Reporting in the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein notes that this isn’t a design flaw; it’s an intentional barrier to sticker shock:

As originally envisioned, Healthcare.gov (which serves the residents of 36 states) was supposed to enable individuals to shop for health insurance starting Oct. 1, 2013, just as they would shop for airline tickets on Orbitz.

But unlike Orbitz, Healthcare.gov makes consumers seeking information on their available choices go through a multi-step process to create an account and then log in and enter personal information.

Administration officials imposed these extra steps because they didn’t want consumers to see the base price of the health insurance plans offered – which are inflated by new regulations – before the system could collect their income data and calculate what they’d pay in premiums after receiving government subsidies.

For a program that’s supposedly so benevolent, it’s interesting how often getting the public to accept Obamacare either requires legal compulsion or outright evasion.

Yuval Levin has a must-read summary of the problems crippling Obamacare’s federal health insurance exchange, Healthcare.gov.

The summary is based on Levin’s interviews with sources in the Obama administration and in the health insurance industry.

Key problems include:

·    Overly Complex: A “late-in-the-game decision to require users to go through a complex account-creation process before even reaching any coverage options.” Not only does this block users from seeing prices up front, the slap-dash decision is the main reason people can’t access the site.

·    Inadequate Oversight: The Obama administration did not hire a general contractor to oversee the IT project, opting instead to keep oversight in-house. The inability of health policy people to adequately manage the technical details meant big problems were not understood until too late.

·    Erroneous Subsidy Calculations: So far, this hasn’t gotten much attention because only a few people have been able to complete the purchasing process. But as Levin points out, if the front-end log-in problems get resolved, the back-end problems regarding faulty subsidy calculations could severely undercut both consumers’ and providers’ confidence in the system. If millions of people buy insurance with a subsidy they don’t qualify for, that’s millions of angry voters who will owe a refund to the IRS come tax time.

Today, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) gives more detail into this burgeoning crisis.

“Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations,” reports the paper.

The reality is that the dissatisfaction with Healthcare.gov is likely to get much worse. With the shutdown saga behind us, perhaps some politically savvy conservatives in Washington can figure out a way to turn the growing frustration into a mandate for delay.

This week’s edition of the Liberty Update, CFIF’s weekly e-newsletter, is out. Below is a summary of its contents:

Ellis:  ObamaCare’s Higher Premiums, Deductibles Act as Massive Wealth Transfers
Lee:  “Affirmative” Action: Is Outlawing Discrimination Unconstitutional?
Senik:  ObamaCare Shatters Progressive Dreams

Video:  Political Correctness in the Classroom
Podcast:  Are Politicians Dumbing Down the Courts? Interview with John Lott
Jester’s Courtroom:  Millions, Billions, Trillions…Septillions

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive CFIF’s Liberty Update by e-mail, sign up here.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses political correctness run amok in our nation’s schools and how it distracts from the main goal of effectively educating our children.

Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale, recently decided to do a study examining the relationship  between political ideology and scientific literacy. Though Kahan has not admitted this publicly, it’s reasonable to assume that his intent was the same as most surveys of this stripe: proving that his opponents were idiots. He didn’t get his wish. As Politico reports:

… Kahan posted on his blog this week that he analyzed the responses of more than 2,000 American adults recruited for another study and found that, on average, people who leaned liberal were more science literate than those who leaned conservative.

However, those who identified as part of the tea party movement were actually better versed in science than those who didn’t, Kahan found. The findings met the conventional threshold of statistical significance, the professor said.

Kahan’s results are interesting, though not especially suprising. Anyone who’s spent any time around Tea Party types knows that they’re interested in ideas. You don’t pick up an affection for the Founding Fathers, after all, without cracking a book every now and then. Therein lies the problem, however. Kahan hasn’t spent any time with Tea Party types:

Kahan wrote that not only did the findings surprise him, they embarrassed him.

“I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension,” Kahan wrote.

“But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the tea party,” he continued. “All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the ‘paper’ (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused Internet sites like Huffington Post and POLITICO). I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly, I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.”

When Richard Nixon won the 1972 presidential election in a landslide, the New Yorker’s film critic, Pauline Kael, reportedly said that she was shocked because “no one I know voted for him.” That story’s been a metaphor for liberal insularity ever since, but let’s be fair to Kael — she was on an arts beat at a famously liberal magazine.

Professor Kahan, by contrast, is a member of the faculty at arguably the most prestigious law school in the country — a place where one should theoretically be able to develop an understanding of a major stream of American political thought deeper than what can be gleamed from the digital pages of the Huffington Post. The key word there is “theoretically.”

A group of Benedictine monks secured one of the biggest victories for economic liberty in recent memory this week.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the petition of the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors seeking to overturn a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision to strike down Louisiana’s law requiring a funeral director’s license to sell a casket, according to the Institute for Justice.

Saint Joseph Abbey, a century-old Benedictine monastery in Covington, La., hatched a plan to make and sell caskets in 2007 to support the monks’ educational and healthcare expenses. But before the monks sold a single casket, the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors informed them of a ridiculous state law allowing only licensed funeral directors to sell “funeral merchandise.”

The law actually required people who sold boxes to store dead folks to have comprehensive knowledge of embalming and running a funeral business.

The Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors shepherded the outlandish law through the state legislature knowing it would give the funeral industry a monopoly on casket sales, killing competition and allowing them to charge outrageous prices.

With representation from a team of attorneys from the Institute for Justice, the Saint Joseph Abbey monks won a series of court battles. In March, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Louisiana law requiring a funeral director’s license to sell a casket, affirming “the constitutional right to earn an honest living without unreasonable government interference.”

After the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down the law, declaring it an illegal state-enforced industry monopoly, the creeps at the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors attempted to bring the case to the Supreme Court. Fortunately, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, allowing the earlier court ruling to stand.

Finally, after a five-year fight, the monks at Saint Joseph Abbey are finally able to make and sell their hand-crafted coffins.

Software glitches and tepid interest in the program have famously plagued Obamacare signup efforts since open enrollment began on October 1.

Now, more than two weeks in, hard numbers are leaking out that prove the failures of Obamacare registration efforts are more humiliating than anyone ever imagined.

The Obama administration announced a goal of 7 million enrollees in the new exchanges by the end of March. Embarrassingly, just 36,000 people completed Obamacare applications during the first week.

At that rate, fewer than a million Americans will sign up for the scheme by the March goal. The Obamacare enrollment website is receiving a good number of hits – nearly 9.5 million unique visitors in the first week – but a laughable .004 percent of the people who have visited healtcare.gov actually signed up for the service, according to Jeff Dunetz at “The Lid.”

State-specific Obamacare enrollment information is beginning to trickle in, as well, providing additional comic relief.

In the first two weeks, no one at all from Alaska enrolled in the Obamacare exchange. Zero out of 731,449 people. And that’s despite having one of the highest percentages of uninsured residents in the country.

What does that mean for Obamacare? It’s too early to say. But the more times the program can fall on its face in these early stages, the more likely it is that free market, limited government-minded lawmakers can eliminate the program – or at least gut the most reprehensible portions of the law – in years to come.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

I would vote “no” on the Senate deal. I would insist that without a delay of at least six months in the ObamaCare individual mandate, I would not vote for it. In the end, it is the president who must make sure that the nation doesn’t go into default. He can only do so by meeting halfway with the House that holds the power of the purse. The failed ObamaCare rollout has proved that it makes no sense to require somebody to enroll in something they literally cannot enroll in, because the government isn’t ready to have them enroll. No, no, no.

Even though it’s been delayed for a year, Obamacare’s employer mandate is still giving business owners cold sweats.

North Georgia Staffing, a family-owned boutique staffing agency, currently employs 18 full-time workers and 400 temporary workers. Next year it plans to add another 200 temps.

The problem facing Debbie and Larry Underkoffler, the owners, is whether to extend the same insurance coverage to all workers or pay a $2,000 per employee fine, they told Fox News.

The projected fine would be $400,000, while giving all workers an Obamacare-approved plan would top $2 million.

The Underkofflers’ case is particularly galling because prior to any government mandate they already provide their workers – both full-timers and temps – with access to health insurance.

Yet under Obamacare’s system of mandates and penalties, it makes better financial sense for the Underkofflers to dump their temporary workers on Georgia’s federally-run exchange and pare back benefits for the full-timers. In both cases, workers are projected to pay more for health insurance and get less.

All this makes perfect sense, however, if you agree with Obamacare’s primary goal of increasing the number of people with health insurance by regulatory fiat.

North Georgia Staffing, supporters would argue, is laudable but an outlier. Most temporary workers don’t have health insurance. The way to (somewhat) pay for the cost of covering them is to either (1) make employers eat the price increase, or (2) use the fines when they refuse to (partially) fund the federal subsidies temps will use to buy insurance on an exchange. If that means that some owners and workers will pay more for less, it’s a worthy sacrifice to increase access to health insurance for others.

That’s the baseline policy argument for Obamacare’s employer mandate. No doubt it doesn’t poll as well as “If you like your doctor and insurance you can keep it,” but at least it’s the truth.

If anyone is looking for another reason to criticize the Obamacare website rollout, here it is.

“Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance,” reports the Washington Examiner.

An open, competitive process would have revealed that CGI was fired in 2011 by the Ontario government for failing to deliver on time “a new online medical registry for diabetes patients and treatment providers.”

In other words, CGI – the firm responsible for creating a health insurance portal to service 36 American states – couldn’t deliver a much less complicated system for 1 Canadian province. The service was so bad that the Ontario government still refuses to pay any outstanding fees it owes to CGI.

Remember when liberals screamed bloody murder about the no-bid contracts awarded by the George W. Bush administration to defense contractors?

Well, it’s time to mount their high horses again and demand accountability.

I’m looking at you in particular, Jon Stewart.

My wife is not often prone to nightmares. Indeed, so rare and mild are her nightmares that she has asked me NOT to wake her up if I hear indications that she is having one, UNLESS she seems like she is in abject terror for an extended period of time (i.e., not just for three or four seconds).

Late last week, after more than 15 seconds of hearing her cry out in absolute misery in her sleep, I figured those rare conditions applied, so I woke her up — and she was grateful that I did. She then went back to sleep.

But here’s the rub: When I asked her the next morning if she remembered what she had been dreaming about, she answered as only a company Treasurer/Human Resources chief could (she basically fills both roles for a family business). Her nightmare, she said, was about ObamaCare. Literally. In her dream, she kept getting caught up in the bowels of the Affordable Care Act’s endless pages of regulations, so much so that somehow all of those regulations seemed to be closing in on her and entrapping her and drowning her.

It was the worst nightmare she had had in years.

And it hasn’t ended for her, or any of us, since she woke up.

True story.

(1)  A new study from the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA) shows how American consumers continue to abandon old-fashioned wireline telephone service, but Federal Communications Commission (FCC) bureaucratic inaction in the transition to all Internet Protocol networks (the “IP Transition”) threatens harm to consumers, our economy and market competition:

To ensure that ILECs can continue to provide innovative solutions for consumers and compete effectively against other platforms, they must be free to make the best use of their capital. That, in turn, means dedicating their capital to IP – and fiber – based broadband networks, rather than tying it up in obsolete copper-based circuit-switched networks.  At the end of 2012, the ILECs’ share of the consumer voice, broadband-access, and video markets was 34%, 14%, and 10% respectively.  It is time to stop treating the ILECs as monopolies that must be hobbled and start treating them as useful assets whose health is important to this nation’s economy and global competitiveness.”

(2)  Similarly, Raymond J. Keating of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) summarizes how the FCC’s upcoming auction of low-frequency spectrum currently used by TV broadcasters over to wireless firms is fraught with bureaucratic overreach and market interference, citing a study by Duke University’s Leslie Marx:

This incentive auction would have the TV broadcasters getting a split of the proceeds from the auction.  But some, like the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division in a filing with the FCC, argue that the auction rules should be set to provide an advantage for smaller carriers – such as Sprint and T-Mobile – over the largest mobile service providers, i.e., AT&T and Verizon.  Unfortunately, some fail to understand the competitive market process and how businesses gain market share.  Others more cynically are attempting to use government to manipulate the rules of the game in their own favor.”

(3)  Bloomberg.com reports on more positive news for the FCC, however, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court:

The U.S. Supreme Court turned away a challenge by five power companies to new federal rules that lower the fees telecommunications companies must pay to attach lines to electric utility poles.”

(4)  Over at The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, Holman Jenkins puts on his usual must-read clinic.  In his latest piece, Jenkins details successful Internet service providers’ efforts to “tunnel under the regulatory morass that inhibits physical broadband deployment”:

All this renders even more quaint the scrap over ‘net neutrality.’  Verizon is battling in a U.S. appeals court the FCC’s effort to impose this regulatory conceit on the broadband industry – with certain bloggers insisting that if Verizon wins, it will represent “the end of the Internet,” because, you know, there’s not enough competition to make sure broadband operators don’t “censor” the Internet in their own interest by blocking access to websites that compete with their own services.  Uh huh.  The truth is, competition has been more than adequate so far to police the Internet, and now competition is getting jacked up a serious notch as the video explosion stimulates a deluge of new investment. Now if the regulatory establishment would just take ‘yes’ for an answer.”

(5)  USA Today highlights how mobile communications advances have improved natural disaster relief:

Natural disasters are on the rise.  Reported incidents have more than doubled since 1980, and in 2010 alone, the combined impact of earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and other calamities forced 42 million people to flee their homes.  Thankfully, advances in mobile communications have spread to all corners of the globe, providing the victims of disasters much easier contact with relief workers, and each other.”

(6)  The Hill’s Technology Blog details House Energy and Commerce Committee Vice-Chairwoman Marsha Blackburn’s (R – Tennessee) comments on FCC interference with private telecom investment:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a ‘regulatory addiction and … penchant for picking winners and losers’ and the laws governing the agency need a ‘substantial overhaul,’ House Energy and Commerce Vice-Chairwoman Marsha Blackburn (R – Tenn.) said Wednesday.  The agency is hurting the telecommunications industry and crowding out private investment because it ‘is fixated on growing its jurisdictional footprint and expanding its influence in other areas,’ Blackburn said, speaking at a Telecommunications Industry Association event.”

(7)  Fiercetelecom.com reports on the TIA 2013 tradeshow, where keynote speakers from AT&T and Verizon lamented the federal regulatory murkiness that inhibits the TDM-to-IP transition:

AT&T and Verizon envision a blended wireless and wireline service world, but regulatory executives from both telecos said during a policy keynote session at the TIA 2013 tradeshow that a lack of regulatory clarity in transitioning their legacy TDM networks to IP is a key barrier.

‘In 2009, the FCC set some very ambitious objectives, one of which was a complete shutdown of the TDM architecture and merge to IP by 2017,’ said James W. Cicconi, Senior Executive Vice President of External and Legislative Affairs for AT&T.  ‘We’re here in 2013, and no single thing that I can discern has been done to advance that objective.’  Cicconi said that he has gotten little, if any guidance from the FCC on the next step.

And Craig Sillman, Senior Vice President of Public Policy for Verizon, said that while the telco has benefitted from a ‘light touch’ regulatory approach for advancing its wireless business, legacy voice service regulations have hindered its wireline moves.”

(8)  Finally, Mobile World Live reports on a wide range of CEOs repeating their call for lighter regulation:

The opening keynote session at Mobile World Congress brought together the chief executives of AT&T, China Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Vodafone.  Under the theme of mobile operator strategies, talk of digital revolution and unprecedented industry transformation – spurred on by LTE and cloud-based technologies – was dominant…   But if the rapid development of networks and digital eco-systems is to continue, and help boost GDP in the process, much more investment will be required.”

The biggest takeaway from this week’s Technotes?  The FCC has its work cut out for it if it truly seeks to advance innovation and modernization.