Last week FCC Chairman Genachowski analogized the FCC to a "cop on the beat" to defend the agency's ongoing attempts to increasingly regulate broadband Internet. In several ways his analogy underscores how frightening the FCC's activities have become.
This is a cop who ignores the facts of a situation and places the "suspect" under arrest-an innocent person wrongly accused and arrested.
The FCC's own fact-based and data-driven reports concluded this year that both the broadband and video markets are robustly competitive. The report states that broadband has a 95 percent penetration rate, reaching 300 million Americans, achieved almost entirely through private investment in a mere 10 years, not including the exploding mobile broadband market of LTE and WiMax.
Video has a 98.5 percent penetration rate, multichannel video programming (MVPD) reaching 128.8 million households, with the five major cable operators market share dropping to 60 percent, satellite providers claiming 34 percent, and traditional telephone companies winning 7 percent.
Despite the crush of evidence, the cop ignores it and refuses to say that these markets are "effectively competitive."
In addition, this cop likes to make arrests before any crime has been committed, a stunning resemblance to the movie "Minority Report," with the FCC acting as the so called "pre-cogs" to predict the future. By imposing net neutrality rules, a heavy-handed government solution in a wild search for a problem, the FCC strips control of private property from its owners and puts government in charge.
The cop is determining guilt before any action, making up rules to make itself more powerful.
Further, the FCC regularly extracts policy commitments from companies while they are at the mercy of a merger review. In this environment, any rules crafted would be rules that otherwise would not, or could not, be imposed. Only in such an environment would the free speech of critique and analysis be effectively quashed, that hearings and debate would be all but completely shunted. In this environment only the worst limitations could be set, and only the most ill-considered rules layered into existing regulation.
A cop making up rules not otherwise attainable to apply to only one actor, while other rules will be applied to other actors.
This dynamic market needs an Officer Friendly, who works with the community rather than against it.
October 4, 2012