FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 23, 2017, Contact:  Scott Cleland 703-217-2407

Senate CRA Vote Rescinding FCC’s Broadband Privacy Order Paves Way for House Passage and Has Congress Prioritizing Consumer Privacy Protection Over Net Neutrality

WASHINGTON D.C. – The following may be attributed to Scott Cleland, Chairman of NetCompetition:

 “The CRA was made for correcting big agency mistakes just like the FCC’s Broadband Privacy Order, which made consumer privacy protection worse not better, because it prioritized technology over people, net neutrality over consumer privacy protection, the FCC over the FTC, and the interests of edge platforms over the interests of American consumers.”

“The most embarrassing part of the FCC’s broadband privacy order is that it does not really protect consumers’ privacy at all. That’s because effectively it only requires ISPs to keep certain information private when every other entity on the Internet does not have to keep private that exact same information.”

“The Senate’s 50-48 vote today to rescind the FCC’s dysfunctional broadband privacy order under the Congressional Review Act paves the way for the House to vote soon on a companion bill that has already been introduced. When that bill is passed by the House, it will create legislation that President Trump can soon sign into law.”

NETCompetition.org is a pro-competition e-forum representing broadband interests. 

Scott Cleland served as Deputy U.S. Coordinator for  International Communications and Information Policy in the George H. W. Bush Administration. 

Please see my The Hill op-ed on: “Consumer privacy is more important than net neutrality.”

Please don’t miss my op-ed on Google in the Australian: “Google out to steal from Australians.”

As Googleopoly has done around much of the world for many years, Google is now twisting arms in Australia’s government to provide Google with blanket protection from Australians’ copyright infringement lawsuits against Google for aiding and abetting in the piracy of Australians’ copyrighted content.

The piece makes fun of Google’s claims that without protection, Google won’t have the financial incentive to innovate.

Please don’t miss my latest The Hill op-ed: “Pai’s FCC is rebooting broadband facilities competition and 5G investment.”

It uncovers what is important underneath the focus on Title II net neutrality.

Has a new day dawned for U.S. antitrust scrutiny of Alphabet-Google? 

The evidence is overwhelming that Alphabet-Google has broadly extended its search and search monopolies into several more markets, and that it has done so anti-competitively in the four years since the FTC chaotically shut down its search, search advertising, and Android investigations in January 2013.

The question here is will Google’s many monopolies enjoy no FTC antitrust enforcement over the next four years of the Trump Administration, like Google apparently enjoyed in the last four years of the Obama Administration?   

To set a baseline of what has happened since the FTC apparently stopped enforcing antitrust law against Google, its instructive to remember where Google stood at that time with the FTC, via brief conclusions from the FTC staff investigators and then from the FTC commissioners.

In October 2012, the FTC Staff Report said:    

“Staff concludes that Google’s conduct has resulted – and will result – in real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets. Google has strengthened its monopolies over search and search advertising through anticompetitive means, and has forestalled competitors ability to challenge those monopolies, and this will have lasting negative effects on consumer welfare,” per a partial copy posted by the Wall Street Journal (p. 116).

On January 3, 2013, the FTC official press statement said:

“The FTC… conducted an extensive investigation into allegations that Google biased its search results to disadvantage certain vertical websites; and that Google entered into anticompetitive exclusive agreements for the distribution of Google Search on both desktop and in the mobile arena. The agency decided not to take action in connection with these allegations.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai gets it that 5G wireless is a gamechanger for the rationale underlying the Wheeler-FCC’s Title II Open Internet order and net neutrality policy.

Fast-changing markets and new competitive realities are a huge threat to the viability of the previous-FCC’s Title II Open Internet Order and net neutrality policy because they are based on the unsupported and unproven assumption that competitive ISPs command monopoly market power.

FCC Chairman Pai enjoys a plethora of new competitive evidence that enables this FCC to reverse the previous FCC’s Open Internet order, based on recent tectonic market changes, new competitive realities, and Chairman Pai’s return to FCC policymaking based on real world evidence, reason and the law. 

Two years is an eternity in Internet time.

In a nutshell, multiple 5G mobile broadband developments cumulatively change everything in creating dramatically more mobile broadband capacity and speed, and much more fixed vs. mobile broadband competition.

Bottom-line: Broadband communications competition is well on the way to catapulting to another level of competitive intensity.

These new competitive realities seriously imperil the FCC’s rationale supporting the Title II Open Internet order, the case for strong net neutrality authority, and the justification for preemptive regulations.  

Let me start by defending Alphabet-Google’s right and decision to sue Uber for what it says was the “unlawful misappropriation of our trade secrets, patent infringement, and unfair competition,” by way of the alleged unauthorized downloading “over 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files” from Alphabet-Google-Waymo’s work on its proprietary self-driving car LiDAR hardware sensors.

I support every property owner’s right to protect their property from theft.

That said, when Alphabet-Google, arguably America’s worst corporate IP thief (see below), sues Uber for IP theft, it reminds us of the adage that there is “no honor among thieves.”

This appears to be a teachable moment for Uber’s legal defense team.

That’s because Google’s long career as the Master-IP-Thief -- built upon the systematic, predatory, expropriation of others’ IP to gain unbeatable anti-competitive cost and time-to-market advantages -- has provoked dozens of IP infringement cases against Google (see below).

These IP infringement lawsuits against Google, in turn have pressed Google to create copious new legal defenses, theories, strategies, delay-tactics, and parlor tricks, which provide Uber’s legal defense a Master-IP-Thief’s guide to beating or outlasting even a dead-to-rights IP infringement rap, like Uber appears to face.

New Trump FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s keynote speech on “Building the 5G Economy” at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today spotlighted to the communications world that the U.S. FCC is going in a very different policy direction than that of the previous FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who just happens to be speaking at the same event as a private citizen to a break-out session on “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The fact that they are both at the largest communications event in the world delivering starkly divergent messages and visions, on the same day, provides an instructive and illuminating opportunity to juxtapose their contrasting policy approaches.

First, FCC Chairman Pai’s remarks focused on getting the FCC and government out of the market’s way in the 5G economy; and on producing more 5G wireless choices for consumers, broadband investment, and innovation throughout the Internet ecosystem -- in order to encourage economic growth.

In contrast, Mr. Wheeler’s remarks are tellingly about “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” which is about how governments that see the Internet more as a public shared commons and less as an economic exchange marketplace, can enable the digital commons to technologically integrate the current “digital sphere,” with the yet to be fully-automated “physical and biological spheres,” to create one fully-integrated system of world production.    

Defenders of the previous FCC’s Title II Open Internet Order appear afraid to have a free and open discussion about how Title II net neutrality affects Americanconsumers.

Like a poker player’s “tell,” leading Title II net neutrality defenders tellingly resort first to ad hominem attacks in challenging the financial motives of most everyone that is making the pro-consumer case for overturning the previous FCC’s Open Internet order. 

Why are they leading with ad hominem attacks?

As most understand, ad hominem attacks are the refuge of those who know the facts are not on their side of the argument.

It is no secret that I freely and openly disclose that I am Chairman of NetCompetition, an e-forum that “promotes competitive Internet choices for consumers” and is supported by broadband interests; and that I am President of Precursor LLC, a consultancy that serves Fortune 500 companies.  

It is the height of irony that proponents of Title II net neutrality advocate for freedom of speech and for preemptive protections from discrimination, appear to advocate discriminating against the speech of those advocating for a free market competition of ideas, innovations, products, services, models, etc.

Why are defenders of the previous FCC’s Title II Open Internet order apparently panicking about having to publicly defend the order’s real effect on American consumers?

First, they did not consider that someday they might have to publicly defend their order without the official acclamation power of the White House and FCC bully pulpits.

Summary: The de facto Goobook ad cartel is quickly crushing its only current online social advertising platform competitor, Twitter. Twitter’s failing business is the proverbial canary in the coal mine that should bring attention to the imminent danger of this apparent cartel to the future commercial viability of the broader online content marketplace.

Practically it means U.S. antitrust authorities’ lax antitrust enforcement has facilitated the emergence of twin colluding monopolies in search and social advertising. The result is a de facto and unaccountable new media cartel, the 21^st century Google/Facebook Fourth Estate, that is anti-competitively destroying and supplanting the original, old media, Fourth Estate, and that is the central facilitator of algorithmic-automated “fake news.”      

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The evidence is piling up that Alphabet-Google and Facebook’s apparent collusion in 2014 -- to abruptly stop competing directly in search and social advertising, in order to divide up the online ad market to entrench and maximize their respective search and social ad monopolies -- is seriously harming competition.

Twitter, as the only significant, independent, social advertising platform competitor, is the proverbial canary in the coal mine of nontransparent, unaccountable, winner-take-all, netopoly ad platforms.