As Google’s pervasively-invasive, track-to-target, advertising-ambitions continue to metastasize throughout people’s lives and physical space -- via contact lens monitoring, Google Glass recording, Nest home sensors, self-driving car tracking, Internet of things listening devices, etc. -- Google’s privacy promises simply don’t have credibility.
Recently the leading public voice of Title II reclassification of broadband, Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford, asserted “All the FCC has to do is change their mind and say, ‘We got it wrong.’ [The FCC] has ample political congressional authority to do that, this is just a political battle. The FCC is concerned that if it acts to carry out this administrative relabeling, it will lose half its budget and half its staff.”
The FCC did not get it wrong. Professor Crawford and supporters of reclassification have it all wrong.
There are three key problems with Professor Crawford’s reclassification position:
For those who want to hear some of the best arguments and rebuttals for/against Title II reclassification of broadband, please listen to the 13 minute back-and-forth between Professor Susan Crawford and I today.
It’s a good precursor of the debate ahead.
Title II Reclassification Series
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 14, 2014
Contact: Scott Cleland 703-217-2407
Court Upholds FCC’s “General Authority to Regulate” Broadband in Verizon v. FCC, But Denies FCC Authority to Impose Common-Carrier-like Regulation of Broadband. This win-win, Could Settle into a de Facto Net Neutrality Peace, if Parties Don’t Appeal
WASHINGTON D.C. – The following quotes addressing the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Verizon v. FCC decision may be attributed to Scott Cleland, Chairman of NetCompetition:
Net neutrality activist opposition to AT&T’s new Sponsored Data offering exposes that the purpose of “net neutrality/open Internet” is not just about protecting consumers and free speech, or preventing anti-competitive behavior.
Those calling for an FCC investigation of AT&T’s Sponsored Data are trying to mutate the “net neutrality/open Internet” debate to also be about whether or not there should be permanent economic entitlements, i.e. downstream “zero-price” subsidies, for edge websites and applications – to “subsidize creativity” and start-up innovation via an explicit FCC ban on network termination charges.
Translation: all websites and applications should be entitled, by “open Internet” network design, to no cost Internet distribution/access to consumers forever, regardless of the costs that their services cause everyone else to pay for.
Please see my latest Daily Caller op-ed: “Google’s Robots and Creeping Militarization.”
It is Part 20 of my Google Spying Series.
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Google Spying Series
Part 1: All the Blackmail-able Info that 'J. Edgar Google' Collects on You [7-17-08]
To learn why America needs to modernize its obsolete communications laws, please take three minutes to view this video where I explain why -- here.
Many thanks to Dan Berninger, Founder of the Voice Communications Exchange, for producing this video "VCXC Examines the Future of Communications."
Net neutrality activists’ criticism of AT&T’s new freebie for consumers called Sponsored Data is nonsensical.
AT&T’s pricing innovation creates a new freebie for consumers and a new freedom for web providers of Internet content, apps and devices that is fully in keeping with any reasonable notion of a free and open Internet.
AT&T’s Sponsored Data offering is no different from other business freebies offered to consumers to market and competitively differentiate their businesses like: Amazon’s free shipping and free Kindle wireless service; Apple’s free messaging and video conferencing; Google’s free Search, Fiber, Maps, Mobile Operating System, and video conferencing offerings; or Yahoo’s free email. A full list of all free and open Internet consumer freebies would be endless.
AT&T’s Sponsored Data innovation is no different from sponsored ads, website sponsors, content sponsors or any other kind of Internet sponsor.
It is nonsensical for net neutrality activists to not be open to yet another free web service. On what reasonable basis is a consumer freebie from AT&T different than a consumer freebie offered by any other competitor in the Internet ecosystem?
A new European study from Britain’s Office of Communications tries to argue that the EU’s wireless regulation approach is better than America’s. The New York Times’ clever headline on the report sees right through it: “Europeans pay less for mobile use, but at a cost."
In Europe, regulators regularly lower prices and roaming rates for political purposes, ignoring the market economics or economic sustainability of their regulatory approach. The EU’s politics-of-the-moment interest in lower prices, based more on operating costs than total costs that fund long-term investments in infrastructure, ultimately harms consumer value.
