FCC Commissioner: Regulating Poor Comcast Compels Us To Regulate All Speech On The Internet. Huh?
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell (R-Obviously) recently warned conservative bloggers that the Commission's decision to repudiate Comcast for crippling Bit Torrent could lead the government to start "dictating content policy" by requiring blogs to give equal time to opposing views. Ha! Of course, this can be avoided if we vote for the *ahem* "right" candidate in November.
The commissioner, a 2006 President Bush appointee, told the Business & Media Institute the Fairness Doctrine could be intertwined with the net neutrality battle. The result might end with the government regulating content on the Web, he warned. McDowell, who was against reprimanding Comcast, said the net neutrality effort could win the support of “a few isolated conservatives” who may not fully realize the long-term effects of government regulation.
“I think the fear is that somehow large corporations will censor their content, their points of view, right,” McDowell said. “I think the bigger concern for them should be if you have government dictating content policy, which by the way would have a big First Amendment problem.”
“Then, whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which won’t be called that – it’ll be called something else,” McDowell said. “So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”
McDowell's scare tactics aren't new. Conservative bloggers have tried to sabotage the net neutrality debate by making a false connection to the long-dead fairness doctrine, which required regulated media outlets to give equal time to opposing views. If the government penalizes Comcast for crippling the internet, the argument goes, well then that friends is regulation; and if the government can regulate Comcast, it must, obviously, regulate the rest of the internet immediately. This kindles the fear of god in conservative talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who would rather stay silent than let Al Franken take up his airtime calling him a big fat idiot.
In the spirit of fairness, Commissioner McDowell is more than welcome to respond, provided he respects our own regulations.
McDowell: Fairness Doctrine, Net Neutrality Linked [Broadcasting & Cable]
FCC Commissioner: Return of Fairness Doctrine Could Control Web Content [Business & Media Institute]
(Photo: Getty)
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I cannot possibly think of a better way for the government to use my tax dollars than to fund regulation and control of internet content.
Wait -- what??
Here is what he said:
Comcast is a big corporation. They have lots of money.
Citizens of the US- fuck off.
Or:
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who's buyin'?
If they regulate blogs and stories with equal opposing views can you say LAWSUIT? Big fat lawsuit! Supreme Court please let us keep amendment #1 since you don't seem to care about #4 anymore.
It hurts my brain to even think about how these two things (throttling and regulating content) are even remotely connected. Sounds like the ol' Republican fear machine gearing up for November ("Vote for McCain or the internet will be censored").
No what he's saying is, "you make us regulate them, we regulate everyone"
Be careful what you ask for....
@ TexasScout
They are 2 different things. You can't just regulate free spech that hurts no one. The government can however regulate corporations. The 2 are mutually exclusive.
It still doesn't mean it can't happen, after all you can't take hair gel on a plane anymore.
I think the big deal here is that we're not running our blogs on community or taxpayer money (like noncommercial radio stations, ie nearly every college radio station). We pay for the bandwidth to upload them, the host either gets money for us or pays for the blog through ad revenue we make from the content on the blog. Meanwhile, Comcast is advertising unlimited internet connections, but is trying to deliver a shaped internet connection. We are paying Comcast for a product they aren't delivering, and due to the expense of laying infrastructure, in many if not most areas, they or the dominant cable company are the only real game in town. DSL isn't very fast and costs a lot for what it is, and dialup is so slow it is near useless for most Web 2.0 applications.
Unless the honorable representative has a plan to enhance infrastructure so we get to choose from, say, 6 internet providers that actively compete to sell similar services. FIOS is a step in the right direction, as it is as fast as cable, and capable of going faster if they want to start a speed war. However, it's just one other option, and if both companies start traffic shaping, who'll offer the better option in an industry hard to start in?
It's like the Bell System divestiture of the 70s and 80s -- first they regulated the phone companies and then they regulated the phone *calls*.
Except they didn't.
So asking the Gubmint to slap Comcast on the wrist for attempting to regulate the amount of bandwidth they allow to their own customers is a good thing?
How?
I'm not anymore pleased than you guys are that Comcast is the only game in town for a lot of people and they can suck horribly, but if you truly want more choices for bandwith the LAST thing we need to do is have the FCC start playing around.
What a load of absolute garbage!
This is why I quit the republican party, after that Ted Stevens "my emails are stuck in the internets" fiasco.
After I heard republicans talking about "letting the market decide" about our critical infrastructure, I realized how full of crap they were.
Just an FYI for everybody, the internet has very little to do with the "free market", it has never been free, and the private companies that provide internet service are as in bed with the government as Halliburtan.
The market could have developed the internet, but it didn't; we needed the government for that.
The telcos are NOT interested in providing the best service possible or innovating, their sole interest is to make money.
If anything, they would have an incentive to degrade our connections so they could charge us more to get back what we already have now.
That, combined with mutual pooling of the market and price fixing.. wow I can hardly wait!
Does this mean I'll be able to see articles about how unchecked corporate fascism is killing this country-as-we-know-it on Fox News' website?
The FCC regulates broadcasters because the spectrum is finite. This "spectrum scarcity" justifies the whole existence of broadcast licenses.
Sites like this site seem to suggest that the bandwidth on the Internet is not nearly as scarce.
You should rtfm before you make comments like that.
I find your ignorance offensive.
No one cares if Comcast offers a product to customers and then delivers it.
What people have a problem with is Comcast fraudulently providing "unlimited" internet access, and then secretly degrading (oh, sorry "shaping") people's internet connections.
Reasonable network management is temporally tweaking your firewall to weather a DDoS attack.
Reasonable network management is NOT blocking an entire range of network protocols, and then denying it!
@rellog: What I find amusing is that many repubs and neocons are crying because Obama gets more air time than McCain- even though it was that nitwit Reagan that trashed the equal time requirement in the first place.
Are you sure you aren't thinking of the Fairness Doctrine? Equal time is alive and well last time I checked - the Fairness Doctrine however is not, and that's why people like Rush Limbaugh exist now.
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn't belong....
What a lame fear tactic.
The fairness doctrine is crap to be sure.
The spirit of laws regulating content may have made sense when most of our mass culture was filtered through three television channels, and maybe a dozen radio stations.
But as long as the FCC keeps the internet free and neutral, we will be fine.
I rtfmw or what ever your saying.
I find your offensiveness ignorant.
I want more choices in internet service too. I don't think giving the FCC a bigger stick is going to make things any more difficult on Comcast.
If Comcast broke the law then they broke the law and should be punished, but the point I'm making is if we start trying to control bandwith other than for licensing it will have consequences worse than what we we already have.
What would this do to my beloved Kotaku?
the sad thing is, its not the just republicans and "their fear tactics" to blame, its those in both parties that want the rebirth of the fairness doctrine will include the internet along with radio and TV even if the SCOTUS struck the old rules down nearly 20 years ago.....
the far left will strike at the right, and the far right will strike at the left, and the people in the middle will suffer...
and the "its public airwaves" arguement is a joke, the federal government got involved once they found a cash cow that they could suck dry, they did it becore "Big Radio" took control of it, and now the snakes in DC see a new cash cow to control and drain.... the internet...
Fairness Doctrine is wrong, except when it's used to prop up Creationism Intelligent Design.
Well let's say they start by implementing equal-time again on the airwaves first. Buh-Bye, Rush f*cking Limbaugh!
OH wait, that doesn't jive? FUCK YOU THEN.
I'm with the neocon haters here.
read what McCain actually said about his stance on where net neutrality should come from. smart, everyone, real smart.
He's invoking the slippery slope fallacy. It's silly, but it isn't some giant neocon conspiracy. It's just one man talking.
Just more fear mongering - same as Rush or Hannity squealing about how "the Dems are gonna bring back the fairness doctrine!!1!!1ONE!" They know it's a load of crap, it's just booga booga talk designed to scare the mindlesss followers into action.
Sadly, in this case the fear mongering is being done to sway the presidential election, and it's being done using the power of the federal government. Disgraceful.
You know, there are plenty of liberal talk radio hosts out there and NO ONE listens to them? Why? Because no one wants to listen to three hours talking about how things suck because it's all Bush's fault. Rush owns talk radio because people listen to them.
The "Fairness" Doctrine is a ploy by people who can't succeed in a free market where consumers have choice to be forced to try to pull down the achievers because others didn't have a voice?
You want fairness? You can have half of talk radio and the opinion page of the WSJ when we can have ABC, CBS, NBC, PMSNBC (aka DNCTV), The New York Times, Washington Post, etc. etc. etc.
Seriously Consumerist, the fairness doctrine is BAD for the consumer because it kills the choice the market makes. Go buy XM for Air America if you want liberal talk.
Hey, no disrespect intended, but some of my best ideas were had while jerking furiously!!
Am I crazy or just stupid ? I honestly did not understand how regulating COMCAST as a corporation will force/make them regulate the internet...
@battra92:
Seriously Consumerist, the fairness doctrine is BAD for the consumer because it kills the choice the market makes. Go buy XM for Air America if you want liberal talk.
Nobody here disagrees with the notion that the Fairness Doctrine is a bad idea.
Everybody is just saying that regulating Comcast to prevent against them randomly turning off parts of the internet (in this case, BitTorrent) is not some sort of echo of the Fairness Doctrine. It's more like "preventing somebody from forcing you to shut up". There's a whole mess of laws in the same vein, afaik. (IANAL so your memory may vary)
And to the other person; BitTorrent is used to distribute legal things as well. There are a lot of legitimate uses for it; WoW uses it for patching, TASVideos uses it to distribute recorded movies, Linux distros use it.... I'm not hearing anybody say that the web should be banned because you can use Google to find illegal downloads, and BitTorrent is the same way.
I haven't done any research, but I wouldn't be surprised if XM and Sirius are both heavily supporting reinstatement of the "Not at all" Fairness Doctrine. After Stern was kicked off the air, look what happened to satellite subscriptions... Imagine Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, Ingraham, et al, forced off the air to satellite. Stern becomes a dried up drop in the bucket. And now that XM and Sirius have merged, they won't even have to fight over them!!
And for those who don't think it could happen... Read the wiki... They're just trying to figure out how to sneak it through.
Isnt this what the dems were trying to do to am talk radio? They cant keep a liberal talk show going on am radio, because noone wants to hear it. They cant compete with the conservative talk shows.... so they tried to use the fairness doctrine to basically destroy & shut dont conservative am radio talk shows.
The FCC ommissioner certainly has some balls for using the same tactic.
However its a bit different... he doesnt wasnt to upset comcast because they are in bed together.
@: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who's buyin'?
Simpler than that. Power attracts the corruptible.
That being said, this isn't the fairness doctrine here, nor should it be construed as such. I say make it easy, however, for everyone. No new regulation but one. Should Comcast (or any ISP) choose to throttle ANY net application, they just lose their "common carrier" status.
I can see the lawyers sharpening their knives and readying their forks at that thought.
Today, in its daily Internet operations, AT&T is shielded by a federal law that provides a powerful immunity to copyright infringement. The Bells know the law well: They wrote and pushed it through Congress in 1998, collectively spending six years and millions of dollars in lobbying fees to make sure there would be no liability for "Transitory Digital Network Communications"-content AT&T carries over the Internet. And that's why the recording industry sued Napster and Grokster, not AT&T or Verizon, when the great music wars began in the early 2000s.
Here's the kicker: To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data "without selection of the material by the service provider" and "without modification of its content." Once AT&T gets in the business of picking and choosing what content travels over its network, while the law is not entirely clear, it runs a serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. - Slate
@ forgottenpassword: Isnt this what the dems were trying to do to am talk radio? They cant keep a liberal talk show going on am radio, because noone wants to hear it. They cant compete with the conservative talk shows.... so they tried to use the fairness doctrine to basically destroy & shut dont conservative am radio talk shows.
b-b-but if the mainstream media is truly liberal then they would have to give equal time to conservatives in their programs. Wouldn't that more than make up the difference? I mean since all the MSM is an ebil demoncrat liebrul commie, turrist loving, front and all that.
The logic doesn't make sense. Wouldn't this HELP conservatives? I mean they do an article on abortion they have to provide the counterpoints, evolution? Same thing.
That's why, not agreeing with the fairness doctrine myself, I call bullsh*t on conservatives one way or the other.
Either they're lying about the MSM being nothing more than fronts for ebil commie liebruls or they're just afraid it'll expose more hypocrisy in them than the liberals.
@battra92: You want fairness? You can have half of talk radio and the opinion page of the WSJ when we can have ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC (aka DNCTV), The New York Times, Washington Post, etc. etc. etc.
Yep, I'll go for a government 30 minutes per guest.
I've even got a great new talk show. The guests are sealed in a booth but can hear each other, only the moderator asking questions, only one mike is alive at a time for 30 seconds (back and forth) and after each pair of responses a new question (unrelated to the previous 5) is brought out, and we'll see how well that goes. I'm not expecting Ann Coulter* or Rachael Maddow* to do to well in that format.
Ann won't be able to talk over and bully people and Rachael couldn't make a 30 second comment that makes sense if you paid her to.
THE PERFECT FAIR SHOW!
*Fill in any 1 conservative or liberal commentator in each slot. Wonder why Rush doesn't do random interviews? How about Keithy Olbermann? Bill'O? Rather?
Because they'd all look like farking jack-a$$e$! That's why. Have you seen what happens when one of these twits can't have things the way they want? They act like spoiled farking kids.
Last mile infrastructure is a natural monopoly in most cases and should be regulated as a public utility or bought via eminent domain and opened up to anyone who wants to provide service over that infrastructure.
Letting the market decide is generally a good idea, but only when a free market does and can exist.
Ah, so you're neutracidal.
First of all, comcast is already controlling bandwidth, I only propose having the fcc assert it's authority to force comcast to stop controlling our bandwidth, except when it needs to for purely technical reasons.
How exactly would "taking our hands off" the internet make it better and enable more choice?
Don't use abstractions here, give me solid examples of how crappy internet service in this country would become better.
The first thing every major isp would do is block bittorrent, if they could get away with it.
And probably degrade voip unless you paid a ransom to them.
Wow, sign me up!
I can hardly wait!
Just remember, Comcast is already imposing it's own FAIRNESS DOCTRINE, and regulating the content of your internet connection.
The only difference is that Comcast is doing it to prevent you from using too much bandwidth on your "unlimited" connection, and Comcast is too cheap to accommodate modern internet usage.
So, infact, the FCC should do the opposite and restore free speech to the internet.
@Quilt: well, i guess they'd have to drop the banhammer on half of the sony fanboys over there to make everything equal. =P
Well most blogs already give equal time. Public comments on blogs would fulfill the fairness doctrine if you wanted to apply it to blogs (as messed up and totally unenforceable as THAT would be).
Round 2, the government trying to control "free" speech again. The internet is no friend to the politicians. Imagine that!
The Net is neutral isnt it? Its a relatively free market with a very low barrier to entry. The internet doesn't care about your political views its a system. You start in google, and you get to search for whatever you want. Its that simple. To mandate that websites MUST give equal time to each side of the issue, well its impractical. That's like telling a car company that it HAS to make 50% of its products Model A and 50% of its products Model B, even though the market indicates that 65% of the consumers would prefer Model B.
When you think about it, the Media will generate content for whomever they deem to be the highest market share. Yes, some of the presenters on Fox News P me right off. And Jon Stewart while funny can be an ass on a few issues. But they must be doing something right or else they'd be singing to a different hymn sheet: they know, that more and more people have the freedom to simply turn off their TV and go browse the web.
Personally I dont see how the FCC is trying to link this issue with Comcast. Its just a loaded excuse to leverage more abuses to freedom of speech.
So...would the "right" candidate be mccain...since he won't propose the "fairness doctrine"?
It's always interesting to confront liberals with their horrible track record of supporting freedom of speech.
@Nick1693: I think it was related to the recent site changes ... for some people, the nickname field was cleared, so even though you're logged in, it says "welcome, !" at the top and doesn't add text for the anchor tag when you're quoted.
I just edited my profile and put my nickname back ... that's probably all other people need to do ...
This is why I have my hosting in a civilized country which respects human rights, doesn't go off to war willy-nilly and has a national anthem that is humanly possible to sing. They also are less uptight about what goes on TV, too.
Yeah, like that would ever fly.
"Excuse me, New York Yankees blog author person, you need to devote equal time to the Red Sox or we're going to shut you down."