Press Release on new FCC "de-competition policy" -- NetCompetition's FCC NPRM Reply Comments

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.

In summarizing the overall thrust of his comments to the FCC, NetCompetition.org Chairman Scott Cleland said:

“Nothing could be more counter-productive to the current consensus behind the National Broadband Plan’s goal of getting broadband to all Americans fastest than the FCC’s potential new “de-competition policy” implicitly proposed in the FCC’s proposed Open Internet regulations and in the oft-rumored FCC re-classification of broadband as a Title II regulated telephone service.”

• “Unnecessary and unwarranted Internet-openness regulation could take away the benefits of competition from hundreds of millions of Internet users, who overwhelmingly prefer the innovation, responsiveness, and diversity of choice that competition produces everyday, over the slow, red-tape, one-size-fits-all outcomes that bureaucratic regulation is routinely known to produce.”

• “Unauthorized regulation of the broadband Internet based on out-dated telephone-dial-up Title II regulations could debilitate the dynamism of the Internet by unnecessarily inserting the FCC into literally millions of everyday decisions that Internet users and providers already make on their own everyday without problems.”

“What could be the biggest risk here is a potential repeat of the FCC regulatory hubris of over a decade ago that heavily contributed to the massive CLEC/fiber bankruptcies and the dotcom crash, because the FCC did not appreciate what it did not know or the unintended consequences of its ill-conceived regulatory changes.”

The link to NetCompetition.org’s FCC comments is: http://netcompetition.org/FCC%20De-Competition%20Policy.pdf

NetCompetition.org is a pro-competition e-forum representing broadband interests.  See www.netcompetition.org.

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