NetCompetition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                           

May 15, 2014

Contact:  Scott Cleland --703-217-2407

FCC Rules Take the “Auction” & “Incentives” out of the Supposed “Incentive Auction”

NetCompetition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                        

May 15, 2014

Contact:  Scott Cleland                                                  

Dear School Administrators, School Boards, and Parent Associations,

If you assume Google is careful to protect your students when they use Google Apps for Education, you are sadly mistaken.

Too many assume that someone else must have done the due diligence necessary to ensure that Google Apps for Education adequately protects students’ privacy and safety, because they unfortunately did not. If they had, they would have been alarmed at Google’s shocking history of knowing disregard for the privacy and safety of their users including students.

This open letter will spotlight student privacy/safety concerns with Google that responsible parents and educators would want to know, given that Google Apps for Education, and Google’s other services, pervasively insinuate themselves into so many aspects of their students’ education and private lives.

It also will provide an important jumpstart to long-overdue, better due diligence of Google’s impact on student privacy and safety. Better late than never, the old adage says.

The Net Neutrality movement has lost its way. It’s now perversely focused on advancing Internet companies’ economic interests at the expense of Internet user interests.

The Net neutrality movement’s main priority used to be about ensuring that Internet users have the freedom to access the legal content of their choice.

Now they have become singularly-focused on securing permanent economic subsidies for edge companies by demanding the FCC set a zero-price for all downstream Internet traffic via reclassifying broadband as a Title II common carrier service.

Essentially, what their latest net neutrality scheme would mean is that Internet users would be forced to shoulder the entire cost burden of maintaining and upgrading America’s expensive Internet infrastructure without a fair-share contribution from the top Internet companies for the infrastructure costs they cause as a result of their dominant consumption of the nation’s daily downstream bandwidth.  

Simply, net neutrality has transmogrified from preserving users’ Internet freedoms to forcing all Internet users to fully subsidize all Internet companies’ bandwidth usage bill no matter if they use a particular edge companies’ services or not.

For those interested, please see a nine-minute highlight video of NetCompetition’s April 4^th expert panel on making consumers, not technology, the organizing principle of any update of the obsolescing Communications Act.

The experts, Gene Kimmelman of Public Knowledge, Jeff Eisenach, of the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America, and Hal Singer of the Progressive Policy Institute, all discussed the merits of making consumers, not technology, the starting point and organizing principle of any update of the Communications Act.

The FCC seems bent on overreaching their legal authority – yet again.

At the NCTA convention, Chairman Wheeler said: “I believe the FCC has the power – and I intend to exercise that power – to preempt state laws that ban competition from community broadband.” And in an FCC blog post, Chairman Wheeler also said this preemption of states on muni-broadband “is an issue that remains high on my agenda, and we will be announcing more on this topic shortly.”

FCC lawyers appear to think this is the time for more overreach of FCC authority because the legal outcome may be different than in the past.

The net neutrality movement is positioning to influence the FCC, Congress, and candidates in the mid-term election cycle, to support their version of net neutrality -- i.e. FCC reclassification of broadband Internet service as a telephone common carrier service.

It is instructive to look back at what happened in the last mid-term election cycle -- in both the 2010 election, and in 2009-2010 Congress -- when the net neutrality movement last tried this.

By way of background, this week the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) launchedNoSlowLane.com, a petition website to pressure the President and the FCC on their version of Net Neutrality.   

The 2010 Election:

Dear European Commission Official,

Would Interpol, or any EU prosecutor, ever recommend pursuing a lenient settlement with their overall #1 worst offender -- without extracting any punishment, restitution, admission of wrongdoing, or deterrent effect -- rather than prosecuting the worst offender to the full extent of the law?

Would any other prosecutor publicly threaten swift prosecution against a high-profile defendant repeatedly and then give the defendant three chances to settle over a period of several months when the defendant’s first two proposed remedies proved to be demonstrablydeceptive in market tests?  

Of course not! That would be antithetical to the fair, honest, and effective administration of justice.

Then why, after its own investigation found Google to be dominant, and to have abused its dominance in four distinct ways, is DGComp strongly advocating that Google be protected from prosecution for clear violations of EU competition law?

The Internet has long had multiple speeds. And it constantly gets faster speeds via technological and commercial innovation, competition, and investment.

The Internet also has long met people’s diverse needs, wants and means for speed, with different technologies, pricing, and content delivery methods, and it will continue to do so.

Net neutrality activists’ latest rhetoric that opposes the FCC’s court-required update of its Open Internet rules, by implying that there haven’t been “slow and fast lanes” on the Internet before, is obviously factually wrong and misleading, both for consumers receiving content and for entities sending content.

Many in the media have fallen for this mass “fast lane” deception without thinking or questioning it.

First, isn’t it odd that those who routinely complain that the Internet is not fast enough oppose genuine FCC efforts to make the Internet faster?

Moreover, isn’t it ironic that the net neutrality activists -- who have long criticized the FCC for the U.S. falling behind in the world in broadband speeds, and long advocated for municipalities to create giga-bit fast lanes for some communities -- vehemently oppose FCC efforts to create “faster lane” Internet for those entities that need it and are willing to pay for it?