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The FCC May Decide Not To Regulate Broadband
This morning the Washington Post reported that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is leaning toward letting the telecomms have their way — not asserting greater authority to regulate the Internet by reclassifying broadband as a Title II service. The blogs are atwitter (HuffPo, StopTheCap) that not voting to apply Title II regulation to Internet carriers is tantamount to giving up on net neutrality — which has been a centerpiece of the Obama administration's tech policy. The Post paraphrases its sources, who are reading the chairman's mind, that Genachowski believes "the current regulatory framework would lead to constant legal challenges to the FCC's authority every time it attempted to pursue a broadband policy." The FCC will say only that the chairman has made no decision yet.
Technical net neutrality is a desirable goal in itself, but not a sufficient one. Just look at the current polarization in congress, which follows the polarization of the electorate, which follows the polarization of news reporting, and tell me that the current way the news is reported is good for the political health of the United States.
Good legislation for fair news reporting has suffered so far because it's confused with freedom of the press. But the constitution doesn't give you the freedom to deliberately lie to the electorate about news they will vote upon - whether you're a news medium or an elected official. We're not going to have a healthy democracy if we can't come up with any way to prosecute that.
Bruce Perens.
Seriously. It's better to have an open, above-board policy that says "We do not regulate this," than an agency that supposedly regulates it but doesn't.
We haven't had effective government regulation of anything since Ronald Reagan. As I sit here, Exxon has yet to pay for or clean up the Valdez oil spill, and BP just destroyed the Gulf of Mexico from Houston to Pensacola because a standard emergency valve was "too expensive."
I'd just as soon drop the pretense. There's no such thing as "government regulation" any more.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The poles, trenches and other means of passing a wire from place to place, and the system of wiring built upon them. Although it's generally the case that one "utility" predominantly owns the poles and trenches - even though they are on public land - and may lease them to the others, the wiring and/or optical fiber and its infrastructure are a separate property for power, telephone, cable, etc.
However, my basic stance is that if you use public funds, you are accountable to the public.
Go tell Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and Crocker, and every such business since. Yes, it should have been the law that the railroad right-of-way remained the public property, and they didn't get incredibly large grants of land and mining rights as well. And so on for pole plants, etc. Great thing to achieve but you have to start working on the politics now, because today it isn't the case.
Regarding GM and the public highway, consider that it has been a much larger give-away than the train folks got, and it didn't benefit the trains, and you and I lost the viable mass transit network of the time.
IMO you don't get more parties and a parliamentary system without a fair media voice.
Bruce Perens.