April 2010

For skeptics of Google's need for more transparency and accountability, consider the latest disturbing example of Google Chrome not asking tens of millions of Internet users for their permission to gain wide open access to their computers and content -- when it clearly should ask for permission -- like every other Internet browser provider does.    

Per ComputerWorld's article: "Google's Chrome now silently auto-updates Flash Player." 

• "Unlike other browsers, Chrome updates itself automatically in the background without asking for permission or prompting users that security fixes or new features are available." 
• "Google uses a unique approach, they don't ask users [for permission to update], they just do it" said Peter Betlem, Senior Director of Flash Player Engineering.  

What this means is that unlike all other browsers or Google competitors, Google does not believe it needs permission from users to gain wide open access to users' entire computer software and all its private contents.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 5, 2010

Contact:  Scott Cleland 703-217-2407

NetCompetition.org Submits Reply Comments on FCC Open Internet NPRM

“A new FCC de-competition policy could take away competition’s benefits from Internet users”

WASHINGTON – NetCompetition.org Chairman Scott Cleland submitted reply comments to the FCC’s proposed Open Internet NPRM.

Proponents of the FCC asserting new "deeming authority," to "deem" broadband to be a regulated phone service and thus subject to the FCC's existing Title II telephone authority, have not even begun to answer the most fundamental questions of what such a foundational change would mean.

• Premature characterizations that this nouvelle regulatory "deeming" would somehow be easy, clean, or containable, simply have not thought through the potential chaos, havoc, and uncertainty that such a radical, foundational, and over-reaching regulatory "deeming" would wreak on:
  • Legal/policy precedent, clarity, and stability;
  • Business investment, and innovation -- assumptions, incentives, models and practices;
  • Economic growth, private investment and job creation;
  • Industry financial stability, contracts, and debt covenants; and
  • Trust, cooperation, and respect the FCC needs to fulfill its mission and its National Broadband Plan.
• Consider the following to be a preliminary, non-exhaustive list of important questions the FCC and others will have to confront, answer and address, before the FCC seriously considers "opening" this potential Pandora's Box of ills.  

I highly recommend two oustanding op-eds that you should be sure to read if you care about the future of the Internet and FCC matters:

• FCC Commisioner Robert McDowell's outstanding op-ed in the Washington Post today entitled "Hands off the Internet"; and
• Former NTIA Administrator John Kneuer's different and excellent take in his op-ed for the Daily Caller today entitled "A Hippocratic Oath for the Internet."