The Washington Post reports that a consortium of Google's closest net neutrality allies: FreePress/Moveon.org, Public Knowledge, New America Foundation, Media Access Project, are poised to petition the FCC again, this time to mandate that wireless carriers deliver all text messages to their customers, even including text messages by wireless competitors trying to sell their competing wireless services.
- This latest "Hail Mary" petition is another desperate attempt to breathe life into the net neutrality movement that is on political life support.
- in essence, this petition is asking the FCC to become the mobile texting bit police.
- It comes on the heels of this same group petitioning the FCC to become the P2P bit police in the FreePress petition to ban Comcast's reasonable network management.
These "bit police" petitions are unreasonable because they are demanding policy by exception and policy by anecdote.
- Only nano-regulatory types like the Google-aligned net neutrality radicals would urge the FCC to undertake regulatory nano-investigations and nano-oversight which would be the regulaotory equivalent of counting grains of sand on the beach to guarantee that no grain of sand is treated unequally by the incoming waves.
- Has anyone thought through how many billions of text messages there are? How many quintillions of Internet bits these groups are demanding the FCC police?"
It is also outrageous and unreasonable for these net neutrality radicals to call for complete government bans on competitive market behavior based on the thinnest of trumped up allegations.
- This is a very scary "guilty-until-proven-innocent" mindset that tramples on any sense of due process, fairness, reasonableness, or good government.
- It is also irresponsible for these groups to ask for the most heavy handed regulation of all, an outright ban, without any discussion or proper rulemaking about the legitimacy of the problem, it's impact on competition or innovation, or the potential unintended consequences of such radical government intervention.
These petitions are increasingly looking like special interest "witch hunts" where groups make extremely inflammatory accusations and endeavor to incite others to punish the accused without due process or a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
Moreover, these groups are badly watering down the sanctity of freedom of speech by claiming that every utterance of every person is due the same free speech deference.
- That devalues the constitution, and is unreasonable, unwise and not in keeping with the courts' interpretation of the constitution.
- In this instance, they are taking a stand that wireless competitors have a free speech right to advertise for free on competitors' networks. Please!
- Have these groups no judgment or perspective?
- Doesn't common sense tell us that wireless competitors have near infinite opportunities to market their goods to consumers, on TV or radio, online, in direct mail, in newspapers etc?
- A court should laugh these irresponsible folks out of court. The FCC should as well.
- This is an obvious desperate attempt to resuscitate net neutrality movement that is on political life support.
Lastly, it is unreasonable for these radical net neutrality groups to build a far-reaching petition, around an isolated, extremely short-lived, and immediately-corrected-admitted mistake by Verizon in the unfortunate incident over NARAL text messages.
- If every honest and completely corrected mistake is turned into a Federal case, what kind of society are these folks calling for?
- Are these information commons datatopians who worship net neutrality so out of touch with physical reality that they are willing to trample many of the principles we Americans hold dear... to forward radical and absolute Internet bit egalitarianism?
