I can't remember reading a more misinformed op-ed than today's NYT's "Bad Connections" by David Cay Johnston.

His stated premise that telecommunications competition hasn't fulfilled its promise of lowered prices, more innovation or improved quality since 1974 is apparently blind to obvious commonly-known facts.

In 1974, most all Americans used black rotary-dialed phones, suffered from prohibitively-expensive long distance rates, and phone technology that hadn't changed much for forty years.

Now thanks to competition Americans can:

Press reports indicate that some at the FTC may be questioning if there is sufficient evidence to prove in court the search bias charges recommended by FTC prosecutors. What the media surprisingly has yet to report is that the FTC still has not yet gained access to the thousands of known and likely most-incriminating Google emails and documents that Google has withheld from antitrust investigators -- per the Texas Attorney General's petition to a Federal Court last June.

Intimations that there is no search bias case to prosecute when Google clearly has stonewalled and not fully cooperated with antitrust investigators impugns the integrity of the FTC law enforcement process. These intimations also suggest that Google thinks that its case will be not be decided on the law, merits and evidence, but on political pressure it can bring to bear on the prosecution decision or settlement process.

Background for this post:

Despite reports questioning the evidence of consumer harm in the FTC antitrust investigation of Google, it's obviously there if the FTC chooses to charge Google under its Section 5 authority which prohibits "unfair or deceptive acts or practices." The legal threshold for proving consumer harm under Section 5 versus the Sherman Act is dramatically easier for the FTC prosecution to meet. Thus press reports about Google consumer harm are implicitly more about the furious debate over which law(s) to use than it is about the provability of consumer harm.

A main argument the FTC made to win the turf battle over which antitrust agency would lead the Google antitrust investigation, the DOJ or FTC, was that the FTC had Section 5 authority, in addition to the Sherman Act anti-monopolization authority that the DOJ and FTC both share. Unlike antitrust precedent from the Sherman Act, which guides that consumer harm should outweigh any offsetting innovation or consumer benefits, Congress in Section 5 declared deceiving consumers is illegal harm of consumers.

Mr. Derek Khanna, a new Republican Study Committee (RSC) staffer, distributed a policy brief on copyright "myths" last Friday that the Committee very quickly disavowed and pulled down because it had not been vetted to ensure that it fairly represented the Republican Study Committee's views. Don't expect this policy brief to ever get the official support of RSC because Mr. Khanna has obviously and grossly mischaracterized Constitutional first principles, property rights, and free markets beyond recognition.

There are at least five fundamental flaws in Mr. Khanna's characterizations.

1. Congresses and Supreme Courts have not totally misread the Constitution for over 200 years.

Mr. Khanna's effective assertion that two centuries of Congressional and Supreme Court interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's treatment of property rights, and copyrights in particular, are really "myths" that misinterpret what he posits the Founding Fathers really meant to do in promoting "progress of science and the useful arts," puts his opinion squarely at odds with America's two centuries of experience with Constitutional rule of law.

The genuine U.S. Constitutional principle of "Freedom of Speech" in the First Amendment -- that protects us from the real and time-tested threat of governmental tyranny -- continues to get debased, devalued and misrepresented by the free-of-cost tech movement of Free-Culture, the Free-Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and their corporate online-advertising allies who commercially-depend on free content and the no-cost sharing of others' private property. They justify their means of debasing, devaluing and misrepresenting Constitutionally-protected freedom speech because it advances their ends of an Internet information commons.

Ironically these freedom-from-cost interests just argued against a Constitutional interpretation of protecting freedom of speech in a brief before a Federal Appeals Court in opposing Verizon's challenge to the FCC's Open Internet Order, because Verizon had the temerity to assert its Constitutional right to freedom of speech, in addition to other legal and Constitutional defenses.

Please see my new power point presentation here entitled: "Modern Beats Obsolete in Spurring Economic Growth and Innovation -- Modernize Obsolete Communications Law and Spectrum Management." It is the culmination of a year of research and presents very powerful evidence of how woefully obsolete and absurdly dysfunctional America's communications policy has become.

This neglected problem has been bipartisan in the making over sixteen administrations and dozens of Congresses. It also will take a long-term bipartisan effort to correct. It will only become increasingly imperative to do so as more and more of our economy and society depends on a fully modern mobile Internet.

After reading this presentation you won't be able to look at current American communications policy in the same way again. America's got a lot of work to do to ensure our leadership in the Internet and high tech continues and is not slowed by the nonsensical and unnecessary drag on investment, innovation and growth of obsolete law and spectrum resource management.

Please don't miss the charts. An outline of the presentation follows:

Now we know the real reason why there has been such strong opposition by FreePress and other net neutrality proponents to the common sense economic notion of broadband usage pricing. The newly launched Open Wireless Movement now wants to turn everyone's home WiFi routers into interconnected, free, public-community, "open WiFi" hotspots.

David Carr's (NYT) excellent analysis of how the mainstream media missed the truth behind cycling legend Lance Armstrong's systematic cheating and deception -- that ultimately led to the International Cycling Union stripping him of his seven Tour de France titles, to Nike dropping him as a sponsor, and to his resignation as Chairman of his cancer-survivor foundation LIveStrong -- got me thinking about the many sad parallels there are with how the mainstream media and blogosphere have missed the truth behind tech legend Google's systematic cheating and deception.

Just like the mainstream and sports media had much self-interest and fear in challenging Mr. Armstrong's representations, i.e. the loss of advertising and reporter access to top people in the sport, the mainstream media and tech blogosphere also have much self-interest and fear in challenging Google's representations, because Google is the overwhelming source of Internet traffic for the media (via Google Search, News, YouTube, and Android), and is also the primary monetization mechanism for the blogosphere.

Please see my new Daily Caller Op-ed: "A Welcome Catalyst for Modernizing Obsolete Communications Law & Regulation" -- here.

• This is part 15 of my Obsolete Communications Law research series.

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Obsolete Communications Law research series:

Part 1: "Obsolete communications law stifles innovation, harms consumers"