December 2009

I strongly recommend Barbara Esbin's excellent PFF white paper that systematically debunks many of the core assertions of net neutrality proponents. 

Barbara's clarity of thought, and her reasonable and well documented analysis proves that so many assertions of supposed "fact" made by net neutrality proponents simply can not withstand close scrutiny.

The foundation of American Democracy for over 200 years has been respect for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. The advent of the mainstream Internet in the 1990's created a new and exceptional medium for free expression, much as telephone, radio, movies, TV, faxes, dial-up, email, texting, etc. have created new technological mediums for free expression.

• The argument that the Government must regulate broadband providers in order to preserve 200 year-old First Amendment rights is disingenuous, duplicitous, and dystopian.  

Current justifications for new net neutrality regulations to implement a "21st Century First Amendment" via three votes by un-elected FCC commissioners as net neutrality proponents like Marvin Ammori advocate, could not be a more radical assault on America's real institutions of democracy. 

 If net neutrality supporters really cared about   advancing American Constitutional Democracy, they would respect that the U.S. Constitution is designed to prevent Government tyranny of the people by creating powerful institutional checks and balances, a Bill of Rights, and definitive processes to change laws or amend the Constitution.

Kudos to Randy May of the Free State Foundation for his outstanding op-ed in the Washington Times today: "Voiding the Constitution: FCC rules could counter free speech."

• Randy's must read piece explains why net neutrality rules would perversely accomplish the exact opposite of what net neutrality proponents claim.

At core net neutrality proponents are trying to advance the preposterous notion that competitive broadband companies, the biggest enablers of free speech in the country, are somehow more of a threat to Americans' free speech than the Federal Government, which, unlike broadband companies, has extensive potential coercive power to limit free speech, if not for the constraint of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.    

Since the EU-Microsoft settlement now will allow users to select an Internet browser from Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera among others, the next relevant competitive issue with browsers is if the browsers themselvesa are operating clandestinely in an anti-competitive or closed way.

• In other words, whether or not browsers are non-neutral and divert the user somewhere against the user's expressed choice. 

As I have discussed before, Google's Chrome is not an Internet browser, but a gateway to Google's datacenter to browse Google's mirror copy of the Internet and track the user's every movement.