Comcast

Please read my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "The FCC Transition?" -- here.

Please read my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "Will the New FCC Chair Be a Modernist or Nostalgist?" -- here.

• It's Part 4 of my Modernization Consensus Research Series. 

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Modernization Consensus Series

(Note: This research series previews strategic developments that could encourage consensus to modernize obsolete communications law.)

Kudos to Robert Litan and Hal Singer for the clarity-of-thought and free market policy wisdom in their new book: “The Need for Speed: A New Framework for Telecommunications Policy for the 21^st Century.” Here is the link to the book at Amazon.

As Professor Crawford continues her book tour advocating for a broadband utopia of an ultra-fast, government-subsidized, public-utility-regulated, broadband network with net neutrality, the supposed-facts undergirding her proposal, are crumbling away.

Please see my Daily Caller Op-ed about the latest ITU argument for asserting control of the Internet: "ITU in search of relevance in the Internet Age" -- here.

Please see my Daily Caller op-ed "Why Europe is Falling Behind America in Broadband" -- here.

• It's Part 3 of Modernization Consensus Series.

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Modernization Consensus Series

(Note: This research series previews strategic developments that could encourage consensus to modernize obsolete communications law.)

Today National Public Radio's Diane Rehm Show featured a lively and informative discussion of "The FCC's Proposal for a Free Nationwide Wireless Network" -- based on the Washington Post's top story Monday on the topic of the FCC's "super WiFi" plans.

• The podcast is -- here.

Diane Rehm's guests were:

• Professor Susan Crawford;
• Bloomberg's Todd Shields; and
• Me.

I believe it was a very helpful and informative discussion because it corrected much of the confusion prompted by the Washington Post's cryptic and inaccurate article on the FCC's plans for "Super-WiFi."

It also provided an excellent and appropriate forum to systematically challenge and counter Professor Crawford's selective use of facts in her advocacy that broadband should be regulated like a public utility.

Please read my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "Developing Fundamental Consensus for the IP Transition" -- here." Importantly, it builds upon Public Knowledge's "Five Fundamentals" framework in its PSTN comments to the FCC.

• It's part 2 of the Modernization Consensus Research Series.

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Modernization Consensus Series

Google's latest broadband pilot, experimenting with micro-cell (mesh) wireless broadband in its Mountain View headquarters, comes on top of Google Fiber's high-profile, commercial broadband pilot in Kansas City, that Google's CFO recently told investors was not a "hobby" but a real business opportunity.

These broadband pilots put a spotlight on Google's overall broadband plans and beg an analysis of the potential implications of Google's broadband plans for competition and regulation.

Summary of Conclusions:

1. Securing much-faster broadband access for its users is a strategic imperative for Google.
2. Google can offer much-faster broadband access, more widely, less expensively, and potentially more profitably, than conventional wisdom believes.
3. Competitively Google is counting on favorable industrial policy to accelerate rollout of its broadband offering in the U.S.
4. The more Google offers broadband access the more it will need modernization of obsolete communications laws.
5. Potential FCC Title II regulation of broadband could be the single biggest threat to Google's ultra-fast broadband plans.

In defense of the FCC's Open Internet Order, which unilaterally mandates net neutrality, four former FCC Commissioners and Professor Susan Crawford argue to an Appeals Court that Verizon and broadband providers should enjoy no broadband freedom of speech under the Constitution.

Why are many of the biggest political supporters of net neutrality focusing their legal defense of net neutrality on the constitutional freedom of speech argument and not the main event of the case, the Comcast vs. FCC precedent, i.e. does the FCC have direct statutory authority to regulate the broadband Internet?

The reason probably has a lot more to do with politics than the Constitution. That's because the net neutrality movement has long analogized and politically marketed net neutrality to be like an individual's freedom of speech under the U.S. Constitution -- in a desperate attempt to make an arcane regulatory pricing issue relevant to the public and to mask that it is a solution of preemptively restricting freedom without evidence of a real freedom problem.

The net neutrality movement has long misrepresented the American Constitutional notion of freedom of speech in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in two major ways.