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Why Verizon Wins Appeal of FCC's Net Regs

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post here "Why Verizon Wins Appeal of FCC's Net Regs."

  • It analyzes why the FCC's net neutrality regulations will offend the Court of Appeals and why they are highly likely to be overturned.
  • This is one of the most poorly defended FCC decisions I have reviewed in my twenty years following the FCC.

Google 21st Century Robber Baron

See my Forbes post "Google 21st Century Robber Baron" which briefly tells the story of Google's Robber Baron rap sheet, in advance of Google's Wednesday Senate antitrust hearing.

  • The post is documented with 79 links to the supporting evidence.

The post also explains why Google's Board of Directors have been AWOL while all this scofflaw behavior has been going on.

AT&T - T-Mobile: Opponents Have Competition Double Standard

Why is there a selective political fixation on AT&T-T-Mobile's ~43% combined market share when so many related markets are dramatically more concentrated, less competitive, or even monopolized?

  • This blatant competition double standard originates from the political agenda of the FreePress/Silicon Valley net neutrality regulatory complex that seeks a broadband industrial policy -- to create an information commons and generate tens of billions of dollars in implicit bandwidth subsidies for Silicon Valley special interests.

When the FCC does the "data-driven analysis" that it claims to value, it will discover a blatant competition double standard where broadband critics gerrymander and torture broadband market share statistics to raise the specter of a broadband "opoly" -- to justify broadband regulation.

 

  • It is telling that opponents have to bring Verizon, which has nothing to do with the AT&T-T-Mobile transaction, into the equation in order to manufacture market shares of concern.
  • The outrageous and unsubstantiated implication of opponents' "Ma Bell duopoly" narrative here is that broadband competitors will anti-competitively collude, when all the evidence is that Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Metro PCS, Leap Wireless and others compete fiercely and relentlessly in multiple dimensions: price, value, device choice, quality, technology, plans, and innovation.

 

FCC is Losing the Wireless Future

It will be surprising if the Republican FCC Commissioners and a bipartisan majority of Congress do not oppose the FCC's unwarranted war on wireless competition policy.

 

  • The FCC appears to be itching to start another political battle over competition policy with its upcoming fifteenth wireless competition report to Congress, by making another political decision devoid of supporting evidence or merit, that the wireless market does not have "effective competition."
    • Such a fantastical political finding, helps the FCC to ignore Congress and the law yet again, and also to unilaterally impose new sweeping economic regulations on wireless, including net neutrality.

 

The linchpin of the FCC's de-competition policy to restore the FCC to its pre-1996 monopoly regulation glory days, and to put the FCC in more control of the communications sector going forward, is to politically define away the existence of "effective competition," in order to justify FCC regulation of the mobile Internet.

 

Google Sides with Wikileaks

It is stunning that Google's decision to side with Julian Assange's Wikileaks and make all the stolen secret, private and proprietary Wikileaks information universally accessible to the world via Google search, has gotten virtually no media attention, given the:

 

  • International carnage and controversy caused by Wikileaks reprehensible actions;
  • Media's broad coverage of Wikileaks;
  • Google's serial disrespect for others as evidenced by its serial privacy, IP, cybersecurity, and antitrust problems around the world that have been broadly covered by the media; and
  • Google is the world's leading source for accessing Wikileaks secret, private and proprietary information.

 

When Google's Acting CEO Eric Schmidt told the DLD media conference in Munich (as reported by Reuters):

 

Paid Prioritization: The Demonization of Market Economics

Now we know what "real net neutrality" and "openness" are, and that they are the antithesis of free market economics or competition.

As the FreePress-led letter to the FCC made clear on Friday: "Paid prioritization is the antithesis of openness. Any framework that does not prohibit such economic discrimination arrangements is not real net neutrality."

What is "paid prioritization?"

  • It is quality of service guarantees, market economics, supply and demand, market-based pricing, investment incentives, competitive differentiation, and reasonable network management.
  • Now we know "real network neutrality" and "openness" is more uneconomics from FreePress and the extreme left.

 

Remember FreePress' last Uneconomics 101 lesson was that "above-cost pricing" was an "unfair business practice."

Wikileaks & The Open Internet Coalition

Julian Assange's likely-criminal dissemination of many nations' secret national security information via Wikileaks --  in posting secret, proprietary, and private information that clearly endangers lives, diplomacy and peace -- has exposed one of the darkest sides of the broad open Internet movement, which pushes radical transparency, and general disrespect for secrets, confidentiality, privacy, and intellectual property -- to varying degrees.

  • Assange tries to justify his reckless, irresponsible and destructive acts by claiming to "Keep Governments Open," without bothering to explain the problem his destructive acts are supposed to solve.

It ironic that the Open Internet Coalition is lobbying the FCC hard now to have the Government force Title II telecom utility regulation on private competitive broadband companies in the name of "openness" -- when there is no identifiable or proven problem to solve.

It is especially ironic that leading corporate proponents of the Open Internet Coalition have been so slow to condemn the obvious harm and criminality of Assange's destructive "open" Wikileaks, but are so quick to condemn competitive broadband companies for not being "open" enough -- when the coalition's  definition of "open" is fluid, and when the coalition has no evidence that broadband providers are not being "open."

If it is now so clear that Assange's Wikileaks are a serious problem, why did it take three massive wikileaks over a period of several months for Open Internet member:

 

Skype's Net Neutrality Infidelity Scandal

Skype, one of the high priests of the net neutrality movement, that preaches for Title II monopoly regulation of all the broadband providers it already rides upon for free, has been caught in the act of being blatantly unfaithful to its widely-professed net neutrality principles, by blocking interconnectivity to Fring

  • Arstechnica and The Hill have both flagged Skype's hypocrisy and infidelity to its supposed net neutrality and openness principles in blocking mobile video calling competitor Fring from access to Skype's dominant network of a ~half-billion interconnected users.  

    Now we know that Skype's proclaimed principled stance for net neutrality and openness was really just a cynical PR and lobbying campaign of crony capitalism, and political cover for an industrial policy where the FCC picks Skype, Google Android, and Amazon Kindle as the "dumb pipe" market winners, and all broadband providers as the "dumb pipe" market losers.

    Skype's "do as I say not as I do" stance is particularly hypocritical because of Skype's dominant size relative to Fring, in that Skype has about a half billion users and is "responsible for 12% of global international calling minutes" per Skype.  

NetCompetition Statement on FCC's Broadband Legal Framework NOI

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June, 17 2010

Contact:  Scott Cleland

703-217-2407

 

 

“FCC Regulating the Internet like a Phone Company Would Enthrone “Ma Google”

“FCC’s Broadband De-competition Policy Would Accelerate Google-opolization of the Net”

 

Why FCC's broadband public option is a lose-lose gamble

The FCC would be making a long-shot bet-the-farm gamble, if it decided to mandate the broadband public option i.e. deeming broadband to be a common-carrier-regulated service and regulating the Internet essentially for the first time. 

  • It would be a classic lose lose gamble because:
    • The FCC is very likely to lose in court -- accomplishing nothing, but damaging the hard-built trust, cooperation, and commitment necessary for public-private partnerships to be able to get broadband to all Americans fastest; and
    • Everyone else would lose from the irreparable damage to private broadband investment, innovation, growth, jobs, and America's broadband ranking in the world. 

I.   Lose in Court:

It is a given that the FCC would be sued; and it is very likely that the Appeals Court and/or the Supreme Court would overturn any FCC unilateral assertion of authority to deem broadband a common carrier service.

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