Fighting Off Power Grabs

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Much of the Washington debate over health care reform has revealed that when health care decisions are shifted to Washington's bureaucracies, the consumer's freedom to tend to his own care is eroded. As the Department of Health and Human Services asserts a manifest destiny over health care choices in America, President Obama's Federal Communication Commission (FCC) is assigning itself similarly dubious authority over anyone who wants to innovate online. Much as HHS believes its regulations are needed to protect Americans from insurance companies, the FCC has set up a false choice between consumers and allegedly monopolistic high tech providers. Congress must defend the online entrepreneur, job creator, and consumer with a vigor equal to that spent protecting the doctor-patient relationship.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is threatening to intervene in the maintenance of the very architecture of the Internet, the wireless communication of every American, and even companies' pricing for the privilege of constant connectivity. The consequence of these three bureaucratic power-grabs is a dispirited innovator, a consumer deprived of choice, and a free enterprise system hobbled by federal bureaucrats convinced they know what is best for all of us.

"Net neutrality" is the most prominent of these power-grabs. According to the FCC, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can't resist engaging in such bad behaviors as slowing a competitor's sites to direct traffic to their own profit centers. Though they cannot cite a single case where federal intervention was needed to avert this behavior, the FCC proposes to take over the very Internet architecture that ISPs invest 60 billion job-creating dollars a year developing. It will insist that no information can be prioritized by the ISPs, transferring that power to federal authorities instead. ISPs are left asking obvious questions. Why invest in making a network more efficient, why collaborate to build new technologies, if ISPs will not be allowed to profit from them? In rushing to defend a consumer who has no need of its help, the FCC threatens to cripple the greatest platform for the expansion of freedom and prosperity since Jefferson put quill to parchment.