Network Neutrality and Beyond: The Long Road Ahead

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 19, 2017 at 9:31:05 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Network Neutrality and Beyond: The Long Road Ahead
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Network Neutrality and Beyond: The Long Road Ahead
> By Michael Copps
> Oct 18 2017
> <https://www.benton.org/blog/network-neutrality-and-beyond-long-road-ahead>
>
> Remarks of Former-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps
> Public Interest Advocacy Centre
> Ottawa, Canada
> October 18, 2017
>
> Thank you for your kind welcome, and thank you to both the Public Interest Advocacy Centre for its invitation to be 
> here this evening and to the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Law, Technology and Society for providing this very 
> fine venue. It is great to be back in Ottawa, and a special honor to be delivering the inaugural Howard Pawley 
> Memorial Lecture. I hope my remarks will be worthy of this distinguished gentleman and his life of public service. 
>
> Several years ago, while still a member of the Federal Communications Commission, I came to Ottawa under considerably 
> different circumstances. I was here to encourage an open internet and my strong belief that network neutrality was 
> the sine qua non of an open internet. I was here to encourage a more robust approach to the issue in your country. 
> History takes strange and not always wondrous turns, however, and here I am back in Ottawa as Canada moves smartly 
> ahead while the current majority at our FCC is on the brink of wiping out all the net neutrality progress its 
> predecessor FCC made just a couple of years ago. Maybe the past isn’t always prologue and the arc of history can move 
> downward as well as upward.
>
> For full disclosure, I will give you my conclusion first and then tell you how I got to it. My conclusion is that the 
> future of successful self-government hangs importantly on this issue. If we cannot get net neutrality right, we can 
> forget about the transformative democratic potential of the net. Network neutrality is the necessary, but not the 
> sufficient, foundation of an open internet. And anything less than a truly open internet would be a tragic denial of 
> the awesome potential of digital technology to transform our lives.
>
> OK—back to the beginning. When I was appointed to the FCC in 2001, I thought I had landed the coolest job in 
> Washington. I would be working to bring the wonders of modern communications to every corner of the land, working 
> with mind-expanding technology innovators and meeting with edge-of-the-envelope entrepreneurs, as well as Americans 
> around the country and from all walks of life, about what was needed to get us where we needed to go. After a week or 
> so on the job, I learned that wasn’t going to be the bulk of my job. Immediately legions of media and telecom CEOs, 
> lawyers, and lobbyists descended upon my office trying to convince me of the “wonders” of more and more industry 
> consolidation. They talked about economies of scale and efficiencies of production that would, they claimed, wipe 
> away the chaos of competition and the confusion of diversified ownership. They were talking to a Commission majority 
> only too anxious to do their bidding—a Commission far too beholden to the special interests and one wedded to a 
> discredited ideology of unconstrained free markets and the beauties of self-regulating monopolies and/or oligopolies. 
> So as soon as the FCC approved the merger proposed by those first CEOs who walked through my doorway, along came the 
> next company’s top brass, arguing that because we had approved the first merger, we had to approve this new merger 
> too, just to keep things “fair.” 
>
> The consolidation bazaar went on, usually over my objections and, to be fair, under the leadership of both parties, 
> with a few exceptions, those exceptions being a bit more frequent under Democratic than Republican Administrations. 
> But not frequent enough!
>
> With the Trump Administration‘s arrival and the appointment of a new FCC Chairman fervently in love with free market 
> ideology and closely aligned throughout his career with big telecom and media interests, the prospect is for 
> more—many more—mergers and acquisitions. Instead of putting the public interest first, a duty imposed on the 
> Commission by Congress in the controlling Communications Act of 1996, where the term “public interest” is mentioned 
> more than 110 times, special interests are in the saddle, riding roughshod over the common good. So today we see a 
> proposed Sinclair-Tribune broadcast deal on the cusp of being approved. It is a merger that will give Sinclair access 
> to over 72 percent of U.S. households, end-running the current statutory limit of 39 percent. The Commission is 
> already changing its rules in order to permit the proposal to pass, and apparently it is willing to ignore the 
> Congressionally-mandated cap. Chairman Ajit Pai is busily seeking a way around this limitation. We can go into it in 
> more detail later if you like, but Sinclair has a long history of stretching, bending, and evading FCC rules as it 
> goes about building its empire. 
>
> This merger is just plain awful for the public interest—or, as the Canadian coinage would have it, the “national 
> identity”—not only because it would raise prices on consumers, but because it would significantly erode whatever is 
> left of our democratic discourse. Sinclair comes replete with an ideology and without a reputation for balanced news 
> and information. It actually writes editorial comments in its suburban Baltimore headquarters and then demands that 
> its stations around the country read them on air. Sinclair’s acquisition of Tribune would hammer another nail into 
> the coffin of independent journalism in communities around the country. In its place we would have Sinclair’s 
> Trumpist take on current affairs. So much for accountability journalism.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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