Justice Department: Net neutrality regulations aren't necessary
The Bush administration believes that government regulators should be "highly skeptical" of Net neutrality regulations and instead rely on competition to protect consumers.
The comments came in a public filing that the U.S. Department of Justice sent on Thursday to the Federal Communications Commission, warning against the adoption of extensive Net neutrality rules.
"However well-intentioned, regulatory restraints can inefficiently skew investment, delay innovation and diminish consumer welfare, and there is reason to believe that the kinds of broad marketplace restrictions proposed in the name of 'neutrality' would do just that, with respect to the Internet," the comments say.
(The comments aren't very long and are really worth reading yourself.)
This shouldn't really be a surprise. The Republican chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Deborah Platt Majoras, was almost as skeptical last year, and a formal report from the entire FTC in June came up with the same no-new-laws-needed conclusion.
Public Knowledge, which supports giving the FCC more power to regulate broadband providers, critiqued the Justice Department's filing thusly: "Perhaps the (Justice Department) does not recall that there is very little in the way of market forces to protect consumers. Perhaps the department has forgotten that many consumers have little or no choice at all for their high-speed broadband services. A more vigorous antitrust analysis would have recognized there is a market failure and would have resulted in conditions on the AT&T takeover of BellSouth that would have benefited consumers and Internet companies."
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan.
Anybody else, see the inherent-contradiction (I.E -LIE-) there..?
At best, we have a duopoly, but even that isn't the case in most
locales. Competition is great when there is real competition, but
95% of internet access is provided by a monopoly or a duopoly.
So until you have real competition in play, claiming protection
isn't necessary is just succumbing to the fat pocketed
telecom/cable lobbyists.