"How did the commission come to acquire this power?"
"How did the commission come to acquire this power?" was the core question that Ronald H. Coase asked in a seminal paper he wrote about the FCC in 1959.
- Kudos to Jeff Eisenach and Adam Theirer for an outstanding must-read article in The American, "Coase vs. the Neo-Progressives" that celebrates Mr. Coase's brilliant, ahead-of-his-time insights, and his exceptional clarity-of-thought in asking that profound question fifty years ago -- that couldn't be more appropriate to ask the FCC today.
How did the FCC acquire the power to regulate the "open Internet?
The FCC did not "acquire this power," the FCC is proposing to simply assume and assert this power by tech elite acclamation.
The term "net neutrality" slogan was first coined by Columbia Professor Tim Wu in 2002, and Google rebranded it as the "open Internet" in 2007 when Google bankrolled the creation of the Open Internet Coalition. Net neutrality was further sloganized as "the First Amendment of the Internet," as tech elites have self-deemed that an "open Internet" is an American's "right."