opinion

FCC takeover of Internet not at all "fair"

The push to enforce a federal sense of "fairness" on the future of the Internet took a disturbing left turn last week when the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission unexpectedly announced his plan to regulate the Internet as a utility.

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler's announcement is a solution in search of a problem. It is evidence of attempting to "fix" that which is not broken. It is a search for a utopian sense of "fairness" dictated by people — federal regulators — who respond mostly to well-funded pressure groups and lawyers.

Wheeler's choice — regulating broadband services through federal authority designed to oversee the Bell Telephone monopoly — is all those things. But it is something more.

Turning control of the Internet over to the FCC is an invitation to bring to a thudding halt the creative destruction that has marked the Internet from its outset.

The changes wrought through a free, open, mostly unregulated Internet have been monumental, all in service to a ubiquitous, dynamic electronic web that evolves before our eyes.

What part of that tidal flow of change might an Internet-controlling FCC impede in the name of lawyerly "fairness"? The spread of ultra-fast Google fiber? Wearable technology? Both those nascent innovations tread on someone's sense of fairness.

Wheeler outlined his decision on Feb. 4 in a Wired magazine oped, arguing that Congress long ago gave the FCC this power of regulatory enforcement (known as "net neutrality"). He contends that over the years the FCC "has used this authority to the public's great benefit."

That distorts the recent history of the Web, which flourished not because of sage-like FCC oversight, but because of a rare bipartisan decision during the Bill Clinton administration to restrain government's heavy hand where the Internet is concerned.

Wheeler's choice is not really his, though. The draconian changes he announced Feb. 4 reflect President Obama's desire to see the Internet operated as a public utility under the "strongest possible rules" enforced through the FCC. Wheeler had been pursuing a lighter-touch compromise regulatory scheme. That plan is now out the window.

As originally defined, the egalitarian concept of "net neutrality" — assuring by government edict that large-scale broadband users could not buy their way into favorable positions in the Internet pipeline at the expense of smaller users — enjoyed some mainstream support.

Theoretically, a light-touch regulatory scheme designed to assure the continuation of a "free and open" Internet had a nice, populist ring to it, even if it opened the door for more oppressive controls down the road.

Wheeler's proposal is a fast-lane ride to the investment wasteland at the end of that road.

"We have now, under the president's urging with the FCC, moved from pursuing a free and open Internet to regulating the Internet end to end," said AT&T chairman Randall Stephenson, a former advocate of net-neutrality.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the plan resulted from a series of secretive White House meetings with "online activists" who, in various ways, had found the ear of the president and his closest advisers.

In other words, it is the product of Washington's idea of how "fairness" works. Welcome to the new, "neutral" internet. And the many lawsuits sure to follow.