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Ironically, the world’s leading winner-take-all Internet platforms -- Google, Amazon, and Facebook -- are the leading voices of the July 12th “Internet-wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality.” They want to pressure the U.S. FCC to maximally regulate ISPs as Title II telephone utilities, even though they don’t believe in operating neutral networks themselves.

Even more ironic, is this 1 min. Google-YouTube video -- by the Internet Association, “the unified voice of the Internet economy.” It defines net neutrality and what it wants the FCC to ban ISPs from doing. However, those banned behaviors closely describe how Google, Facebook and Amazon often operate. Awkward.

In yet another video supporting this Day of Action, three U.S. Senators video message said: “We believe the Internet is the extraordinary opportunity that gives everybody in America the chance to get ahead. We have to make sure it is not controlled by a handful of powerful corporations.”

This piece has two tasks.

At best the notions of net neutrality and consumer privacy are somewhat in tension.

At worst, they are in opposition, and harm consumer privacy as happened when the Wheeler-FCC subordinated the goal of what’s best for consumer privacy to the conflicting and overriding goal of what was best for imposing maximal, Title II net neutrality.

Net neutrality and consumer privacy are in tension because they are very different concepts, priorities, and approaches for the handling of information online.

However, the original tension between the FCC’s first concept of net neutrality and consumer privacy was very limited because the Martin-FCC’s 2005 Internet Policy Statement on net neutrality was an extension of the Powell-FCC’s “Internet Freedoms” concept of net neutrality, and both approaches were consumer-first, i.e. very clearly centered around what consumers could expect from the Internet.

What thrust them into the more opposing concepts that they are today?

It was when net neutrality flipped from being primarily a consumer-centric principle to an edge-provider centric principle defined by Google, Amazon, Facebook and Netflix; and from the enforcement of a general broadband nondiscrimination principle, to the preemptive imposition of “the strongest possible,” specific, utility rate regulation framework – i.e. Title II of the 1934 Communications Act -- on a competitive industry that had done nothing wrong to warrant it.

Please see PBS NewsHour’s five minute segment here with Gigi Sohn and I discussing Congress’ rescission of the FCC’s unimplemented broadband privacy order that the Wheeler-FCC majority passed last October by a 3-2 vote.

Please see my latest The Hill op-ed: “Congress was right to save consumers from privacy rules imposed under net neutrality.”

Consumer privacy has been the biggest loser from net neutrality proponents’ politicization of privacy.

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

FCC Chairman Pai’s Proposal to Deregulate Competitive Business Data Services Will Accelerate Private Investment and Deployment of Fiber & 5G Gigabit Mobile Broadband      

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

“Kudos to FCC Chairman Pai for clearly understanding the business, economic, and investment, realities and challenges, of multi-billion dollar private investments in infrastructure; and purposefully organizing the FCC to better encourage broadband infrastructure deployment quickly to be part of the solution to America’s economic growth and job creation needs.

“Chairman Pai knows one of the best ways for the FCC to promote private investment in infrastructure and advance 5G broadband innovation is to encourage facilities-based broadband competition in the business market, by permanently stopping FCC rate regulation of the long, fully-competitive, fiber-based, business data market, and ending most all FCC rate regulation of the antiquated copper-based business data market, except in the minority of counties or areas where there still may be insufficient competition.”

“Let the investing, building, and deploying of the Nation’s next generation, fiber and 5G broadband networks begin -- soonest!”

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

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.

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.

Here is my latest The Hill op-ed on How “Outdated Telecom Law Poses a Challenge for Agit Pai’s FCC.”

• It explains what is NOT a modern FCC.
• It’s also part 26 of my Modernize Obsolete Communications Law Series. (See below.)

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Modernize Obsolete Communications Law Series

Please don’t miss my latest The Hill op-ed, “Congress Please Undo FCC’s Dysfunctional Internet Privacy Rules,” which explains how these last minute regulations created a confusing mess for consumers.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans formally asked FCC Chairman Agit Pai to close the docket on the set-top box proceeding because it is no longer under active consideration, and because it “remains an unnecessary regulatory threat to the content creation and distribution industries” and casts a “shadow over investment and innovation.”

This is a wise, pro-competitive, pro-property rights, and good government request from Congress to the new Pai FCC.

The FCC should efficiently utilize this decision opportunity to employ the statutory sunset provision in the law to permanently sunset and remove this unnecessary and serious regulatory threat to competition, copyrighted contractual content and its creation, investment, and innovation.