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At this point, only the most masochistic and cynical among DC’s policy elite actually desire for the net neutrality conflict to continue. And yet, despite claims that net neutrality principles are critical to protecting consumers, passage of the current Congressional Review Act (“CRA”) disapproval resolution in Congress would undermine consumer protection and promise only to drag out the fight even longer.

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The paranoid style is endemic across the political spectrum, for sure, but lately in the policy realm haunted by the shambling zombie known as “net neutrality,” the pro-Title II set are taking the rhetoric up a notch. This time the problem is, apparently, that the FCC is not repealing Title II classification fast enough, which surely must mean … nefarious things? Actually, the truth is probably much simpler: the Commission has many priorities and is just trying to move along its docket items by the numbers in order to avoid the relentless criticism that it’s just trying to favor ISPs.

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Abstract

Voices along the whole of the political spectrum are calling for heightened scrutiny of American information-technology companies, especially the Big Five of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. One of the principal themes of this uprising is that present-day antitrust policy, forged in the rusty era of steel, oil, and cars, is now obsolete. We are in the age of information, which ipso facto calls for new rules. A second animating theme is that the antitrust thinking of the Chicago School, which came to prominence in the last quarter of the last century, must be completely overthrown. Proponents of this new antitrust ground their arguments by returning to the historical roots of American antitrust policy. My contention, however, is that the new antitrust gets this history wrong. It both misconceives the nature of the competitive process and deliberately refuses to confront the political economy of antitrust. In so doing, it adopts some of the worst traits of the Chicago School it criticizes while manifesting few of that school’s many virtues.

This week the FCC will vote on Chairman Ajit Pai’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order. Once implemented, the Order will rescind the 2015 Open Internet Order and return antitrust and consumer protection enforcement to primacy in Internet access regulation in the U.S.

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In response to the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) proposal to rescind its so-called “net neutrality” rules, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker tweeted that the FCC is “giving corporations power over the once neutral internet.”

Booker and his social media allies think the new rules will destroy the internet as we know it. Except, they won’t.

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It’s fitting that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai recently compared his predecessor’s jettisoning of the FCC’s light touch framework for Internet access regulation without hard evidence to the Oklahoma City Thunder’s James Harden trade. That infamous deal broke up a young nucleus of three of the best players in the NBA in 2012 because keeping all three might someday create salary cap concerns. What few saw coming was a new TV deal in 2015 that sent the salary cap soaring.

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Since Brussels has ordered Ireland to recover 13€ billion from Apple, much ink has been spilled on the European Commission’s (EC) alleged misuse of power and breach of the “rule of law.” In the Irish Times, Professor Liza Lovdahl-Gormsen wrote that the EC has been “bending” competition law to pursue a corporate taxation agenda in disguise. Former European Commissioner Neelie Kroes went so far as to suggest that the EC was attempting to rewrite international tax rules.

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Over the weekend, Sen. Al Franken and Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Mignon Clyburn issued an impassioned statement calling for the FCC to thwart the use of mandatory arbitration clauses in internet service providers’ consumer service agreements — starting with a ban on mandatory arbitration of privacy claims in the chairman’s proposed privacy rules. Unfortunately, their call to arms rests upon a number of inaccurate or weak claims. Before the commissioners vote on the proposed privacy rules later this week, they should carefully consider whether consumers would actually be served by such a ban.

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Next week the FCC is slated to vote on the second iteration of Chairman Wheeler’s proposed broadband privacy rules. Of course, as has become all too common, none of us outside the Commission has actually seen the proposal. But earlier this month Chairman Wheeler released a Fact Sheet that suggests some of the ways it would update the rules he initially proposed.

According to the Fact Sheet, the new proposed rules are…

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