Obama wins the Internet (heaven help us)
To hear Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler talk about the 3-2, party-line
, you would have thought his commission had just passed the "light touch" regulations Wheeler himself advocated as recently as last fall.
"This is no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech," Wheeler said on Thursday. "They both stand for the same concept: openness, expression and an absence of gatekeepers telling them what they can do, where they can go and what they can think."
That is completely at odds with the stated intent of the person who pushed hardest for placing oversight of the Internet under Title II of the Federal Communications Act.
That person, President Obama, said last November that he wanted the FCC to enact the "strongest possible rules."
There is no point in grousing further about the propriety of the president interjecting his considerable administrative muscle into a decision by an allegedly independent commission.
This is President Obama's victory.
We can only hope that the worst fears of critics — that the spectacular, decades-long private-sector investment in the Internet will come creaking to a halt — aren't realized.
The details of the 300-plus page regulatory reforms were not made public until after the vote. The FCC had to vote on the package before we could know what was in it, to originate a thought. We can only hope the devil does not await us in the details.
The experience of highly regulated Internet systems in places such as Europe is one of slower speeds, more taxation and slower investment.
For the time being, at least, we can only hope that in exchange for the assurance that — hypothetically — large, corporate Internet service providers would not some day in the distant future shunt a small Internet-based company into a second-tier data-delivery status, that we have not, inadvertently, killed the digital goose that laid the digital golden egg.