Open Internet

Activist carping about the commercial Internet being commercial is revving up again, this time with the carping focused on framing new broadband usage-pricing innovations by Time Warner Cable and AT&T, as somehow a violation of the "open web."

To cut to the quick and translate what is really going on politically here, this activist carping is the latest attempt to revive and re-fight the manufactured net neutrality debate between:

The evidence below shows the Verizon-Cable agreement is clearly in the public interest, if the FCC fairly reviews the agreement and all of the relevant facts, in the full context of the highly competitive wireless ecosystem.

Top Reasons Why Verizon-Cable Agreement is in the Public Interest

Increases competition: The agreement increases competition because it enables:

(Note: The text in quotations are verbatim quotes from Google via a Politico post. The italics in [ ] is a satirical translation of what Google really is saying.)

“Google’s Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president for Communications and Public Policy issued the following statement to POLITICO regarding a WSJ report that the company has been bypassing the privacy settings of Apple's Web browser on iPhones and computers:”

“The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why.”

• [Translation: What we really did is we hacked Apple. In an open Internet Apple has no right to use a walled garden to protect Apple users’ privacy from Google's omnipresent tracking. We hacked Apple to liberate private data that users and Apple were withholding from the world.]

“We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled.”

I will  be on the CPAC Digital Liberty panel today with FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, Kelly Cobb of ATR and Ryan Radia of CEI.

The very important sleeper issue I expect we will spotlight for the CPAC audience is the imminent threat to the Internet from a China/Russia-led effort to get the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union to regulate the Internet similar to the way they regulate telephony and postal service, via a renegotiation of the treaty that affects telecommunications in Dubai in December 2012.

UN regulation of the Internet would kill the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg, by locking in the past and making innovation difficult in the future.

This is a not so subtle effort to undermine and slow America's high tech innovation leadership in the world by miring U.S. Internet companies in the ITU regulatory swamp.

UN regulation of the Internet is a big, under-appreciated, looming threat to freedom and economic growth.

The FCC's recent call for unbounded spectrum auction authority spotlights an important debate over whether some of this scarce and extremely valuable wireless spectrum should be auctioned or not.

• Ironically the FCC is asking Congress to give it spectrum auction authority to not auction spectrum.
• In other words, the FCC is asking to be unilaterally empowered to decide not to auction some spectrum so it can deem it "unlicensed spectrum," like that used for WiFi and garage door openers.

There are huge fiscal problems with the FCC's position, given our nation's severe fiscal situation: a trillion dollar Federal budget deficit and a ballooning multi-trillion dollar public debt.

First, the real world effect of the FCC's gambit here is to try and get revenue-raising legislation to not raise many billions of dollars.

Reports that “Twitter Can Censor by Country” is a perfect example of how the world is changing the Internet. Change is a two-way street. Conventional wisdom that only assumes the Internet is changing the world risks being blind-sided by the Internet’s underappreciated exa-trend: how the world is changing the Internet.

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post: "Twitter Realpolitik & the Sovereignization of the Internet" to learn about Twitter's new realpolitik and how sovereign powers will increasingly be asserting themselves vis a vis the Internet.

Google led, orchestrated, politically-framed and set the political tone for much of the Web’s opposition to pending anti-piracy legislation, SOPA/PIPA, because rule of law and effective enforcement of property rights online represent a clear and present danger to Google’s anti-property-rights mission, open philosophy, business model, innovation approach, competitive strategy, and culture.

At CES, the FCC signaled that it opposed any effort by Congress to give the FCC policy direction or to establish any checks and balances on the FCC in authorizing incentive auctions of prime TV broadcast spectrum.

See my Forbes Tech Capitalist post "FCC Seeks Unbounded Spectrum Auction Authority" to see why the the FCC's lack of regulatory humility here is so stunning.

Since most people focus on how the Internet is changing the world, few focus on the reverse -- how much the world is changing the Internet.

See My Forbes Tech Capitalist blog post to learn the "Seven Ways the World is Changing the Internet."

To see how the call for the FCC to investigate the allegation that Verizon is blocking Google Wallet is a misinformed Emily Litella rant, please see my Forbes Tech Capitalist Blog post here.