OPINION:
The 332 pages of new regulations for the Internet, revealed last week by the Federal Communications Commission, demonstrate vividly how a federal bureaucracy, if left alone without proper supervision, puts obstacles in the way of the economic sector. It’s instinctive. The instinct to impose bureaucratic harm is exacerbated when an agency feels the pressure of an overzealous White House.
Net neutrality divides Washington policymakers. Some liberals see net neutrality as a fundamental issue of taking partisan control of the Internet that resonates with their constituents. Republicans say that the fully functioning Internet has created a robust marketplace that needs no drastic changes. Most of all, the Internet must not be changed from a Title I information service, under the Telecommunications Act, to a Title II telecommunications public utility, subject to thousands of initiative-killing regulations. President Obama, to no one’s surprise, supports making the change.
But even as the FCC moves to make this fundamental change, it struggles to justify the change to Congress and the public. Robert McDowell, a former FCC commissioner, continues to say loud, clear and persuasively, how this supposedly “independent agency” has never once produced a peer-reviewed study showing harm to anyone by the Internet as it stands. The new regulations are a solution in search of a problem.
Beyond the substance of heavy-handed regulations to disrupt the Internet and increase costs for American consumers, lies a deeply troubling political fact: The FCC, an agency under the explicit watch of Congress, not the White House, exhibits rogue tendencies encouraging mission creep. Misbehaving in defiance of Congress is par for the Obama administration, and the new net neutrality rules to take effect Feb. 26 will encourage more bad behavior.
Over the past months, the FCC in defiance of its own rules issued favorable rulings to please certain wireless carriers at the expense of others, worked to upend years of work by state legislatures to prevent costly and largely unworkable municipal broadband networks, and, in pushing net neutrality, disregards the hard work of Congress and the two Republican commissioners of the FCC. The agency is now under investigation by both the House and Senate for its peculiar behavior, seizure of power and authority it is not entitled to, and has colluded with the White House to make fundamental changes.
It shouldn’t be this way. In coming to the table with legislation including the deep concessions and strong consumer protections liberals have asked for, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota and Reps. Fred Upton of Michigan and Greg Walden of Oregon reached out to Democrats in Congress to resolve their differences over how the FCC should be required to fulfill its mission. By ignoring the attempt to compromise, the Democrats in Congress and the three Democrats on the commission show their hand. The debate over how to protect the Internet was never about preventing abuse by Internet providers and protecting those who use its power and convenience, but whether the federal government, through the FCC, would expand the government’s “oversight” and take an open Internet away from the people.
The FCC is out of control, determined to use the agency to force President Obama’s transformative agenda — the one he can’t get through Congress — into the lives of all Americans.
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