Analysts warn that the Biden administration may soon enact broad restrictions giving it control over the internet ahead of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) vote on the proposed rules on November 15.
“In the guise of ‘digital equity,’ President Joe Biden has called for the FCC to exercise a degree of control over Internet services and infrastructure that we have never seen before,” an FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr, told the Sun via email.
“It will give the administrative state the power to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet works,” he said. “These types of command and control regulations will only make it harder for Internet infrastructure and services to be built out and could make our networks look more like the sluggish networks that consumers in Europe have to deal with.”
The new rules, according to the Democratic-controlled FCC, will “prevent discrimination in access to broadband services based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, and national origin.”
“We recognize that the ultimate goal of this proceeding is to facilitate equal access to broadband, just as the law says,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.
However, the rules, which would govern internet service providers’ infrastructure, network maintenance and upgrades, speeds, and the use of customer credit and account history, among other things, read like “a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university’s Soviet Studies Department,” Carr said earlier this week.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL“Never before, in the roughly 40-year history of the public Internet, has the FCC (or any federal agency for that matter) claimed this degree of control over it,” Carr said.
Carr observes that the rules promise to broaden the FCC’s reach beyond traditional communications businesses, encompassing construction workers, banks, marketing organizations, and other government agencies.
According to the FCC, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed by Biden in 2021, mandates the agency to “‘prevent’ and identify necessary steps to ‘eliminate’ digital discrimination.”
Carr, on the other hand, claims that the regulatory regime goes considerably beyond “the one-page section” of the Infrastructure Act.
“Congress never contemplated the sweeping regulatory regime that President Biden asked the FCC to adopt — let alone authorized the agency to implement it,” he said.
The guidelines do not reflect the “next generation of satellite internet, mobile wifi, 5G, and more,” according to Elizabeth Hicks, an analyst at the Consumer Choice Center. According to her, the restrictions will be hard and costly to follow.
“Congress never contemplated or authorized the FCC to implement the sweeping regulatory regime that President Biden is asking for,” she writes, adding that it isn’t prohibiting the FCC from voting to implement the rules. The proposed laws will damage customers by exacerbating an already terrible internet scenario, she adds.
“Considering government and bureaucratic red tape is slowing down and even preventing broadband buildouts, giving the government more authority and control to overregulate ISPs is equivalent to adding gasoline to a dumpster fire,” she said.
Instead, she believes that the Biden administration should focus on removing government barriers to internet service and fostering a more competitive and free market.
“We need more technology, more investment, and more competition, but that will come from the bottom-up and from innovators rather than Washington, D.C.,” she says.
