Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell today announced that he'll be leaving the FCC for an unspecified job elsewhere. McDowell was the likely front-runner to lead the FCC if Romney had won the election. McDowell's greatest hits since 2006 include an editorial insisting the country has no broadband coverage issues, proclaiming the Internet would collapse if Comcast was held accountable for throttling upstream P2P traffic and lying to customers, and conflating network neutrality with the fairness doctrine for political effect.

Like current FCC boss and Democrat Julius Genachowski, McDowell was a stalwart believer in the fact that the current U.S. broadband market doesn't have any competitive issues that really need fixing. In McDowell's mind, any competitive issues are magically and organically fixed by the "free market," ignoring of course it's not a free market when those giant companies enjoy regulatory capture and literally write state-by-state telecom law designed to keep competition at bay.

Obviously you'll get a significantly different report card on McDowell if you ask Comcast's top lobbyist David Cohen, even if such breathless gushing from a lobbyist should speak volumes:

High prices, limited competition, inaccurate meters, below the line predatory fees, inaccurate government broadband mapping data -- there's a long laundry list of things that could use fixing in the current U.S. broadband and television landscape.

A new FCC initiative promises to accelerate the delivery of 1 Gbps connections to all fifty states by 2015, though the plan upon closer inspection appears to be another hollow agency puppet show. FCC boss Julius Genachowski received ample press attention last week by proclaiming that the FCC was spearheading a new agency program that would bring 1 Gbps connections to all fifty states in just two years.

For years the cable industry insisted that they imposed usage caps because network congestion made them necessary. You'll recall that Time Warner Cable insisted that if they weren't allowed to impose caps and overages the Internet would face "brown outs." Cable operators also paid countless think tanks, consultants and fauxcademics to spin scary yarns about a looming network congestion "exaflood," only averted if cable operators were allowed to raise rates, impose caps, eliminate regulation or (insert pretty much anything here).

FCC Boss and Obama Harvard chum Julius Genachowski desperately hopes that his FCC legacy will be the man who saved wireless, though he'll more likely be remembered for being a wishy washy politician who folded precisely when the agency needed courageous and bold pro-consumer leadership.

While Genachowski's FCC has proclaimed itself to be pro-consumer, they more accurately have engaged in a steady stream of pro-consumer theater: for example net neutrality rules that protect nobody, broadband plans that ignore competition and sky-high prices, and merger conditions that mean nothing.

Over the last few months several reports have surfaced pointing out that U.S. residents pay significantly more for fiber than their European counterparts.

FCC boss Julius Genachowski has been busy lately paying lip service to Silicon Valley, most recently telling a bunch of Silicon Valley conference attendees that caps were something we should be "concerned" about, after telling cable companies just a few months earlier he thought caps and overages are nifty and innovative. Speaking again to Silicon Valley folks yesterday at a speech at Vox Media headquarters, Genachowski hashed out his muddy position a little further, again insisting he was "concerned" about caps -- sort of -- maybe:

The New Republic notes that one of the cornerstones of the GOP's technology agenda being firmed up at the convention this week (aside from censoring porn, opposing net neutrality and further eliminating consumer protections) is "spectrum reform." The New Republic argues that spectrum reform in GOP parlance is really just code for taking any and all spectrum you can find and selling it to AT&T and Verizon, so they can squat on it and prevent additional competitors from entering the marketplace (aka protectionism).

In addition to just throwing money at the GOP, the incumbents and the GOP sell the idea of further protecting the nation's duopoly from competition by insisting they're just super concerned about bringing broadband to rural users.

Whistleblowers the last ten years have highlighted repeatedly how the phone companies are helping the government spy on its own citizens by dumping all Internet data directly into the laps of government (pdf), who is busily building a massive supercomputer warehouse in Utah to dig through it all. The general public's response to this has been slack-jawed apathy, and recently one of the last real chances to challenge our domestic spying programs went up in legal flames.

Scott Cleland is a policy consultant paid by incumbent ISPs to sell his client's unfiltered Kool-Aid to reporters and politicians, and is frequently called to Washington as an "objective" industry analyst, despite his obvious role as little more than a paid parrot. You might recall that when we last saw Scott Cleland, he was busily beating up on Google for not investing in broadband infrastructure, despite billions spent on global fiber runs and storage capacity.

An editorial first posted over at the Wall Street Journal recently bubbled up over at GigaOM. In it, "management consultant" Rags Srinivasan talks about how AT&T and Verizon are, like most duopolies, just pretending to compete -- giving each other winks and nods when it's time to raise prices.

After a year or more of hinting at such a change, Verizon recently unveiled the company's "Share Everything" data plans to more than a little disappointment by consumers and consumer advocates. The plans, while offering unlimited voice and text services, impose very high per byte data charges on consumers in addition to per device fees.

It's 2012, and while politicians like to proclaim that the United States is a broadband leader, the reality on the ground is anything but. In addition to the millions of DSL customers of smaller phone companies unable to upgrade or unwilling to upgrade their lines, there's still numerous communities that no private company wants to serve at all.

Back in February we noted that AT&T, the company that really started the network neutrality debate to begin with, had come up with yet another awful new idea: charging app makers a fee if they wanted to reach consumers without hitting their usage caps. While AT&T presented the idea as akin to a 1-800 number for data or "free shipping," what it actually is a troll toll imposed by AT&T allowing them to rake in new cash -- and impose their power on a content ecosystem that operates better with AT&T out of the way.

Speaking to Congress this week, FCC Boss Julius Genachowski stated that the agency hasn't received a single net neutrality complaint since the FCC's neutrality rules went into effect late last year. Part of that is because the rules don't do very much, failing to cover wireless in any meaningful way, while allowing pretty much any network behavior so long as it can be defended as an action that's necessary to protect network integrity.

Netflix, who once thought bandwidth caps were no big deal, not too long ago finally realized that they can indeed be used anti-competitively to put services that compete with an ISPs content at a competitive disadvantage. Since that time they've been heavily criticizing "cap and overage" ISP pricing models, arguing that they're in no way based on economic or network congestion realities, but are instead primarily used to drive already-expensive broadband prices up, and to drive Internet video competitors out of business.

One of AT&T's biggest problems in trying to get the T-Mobile deal approved was their hubris. In trying to ham-fistedly shove the bad deal down the public's throat, company executives repeatedly lied about the deal benefits (lower prices, more competition, better service) hoping that nobody would notice the hard data that repeatedly disproved such falsehoods.

A few months ago, while visiting my girlfriend's parents' farm, I hear a sound -- a sound I hadn't heard in probably ten years. It was the sound of dialup Internet.

While the FCC will occasionally crack down on cramming (the stuffing of consumer wireless or landline lines with bogus charges for often awful or nonexistent products or services), they usually focus on the smaller companies -- ignoring the role larger carriers play in perpetuating these kinds of problems. As we saw last year with Jawa, a company that was running an SMS cramming scheme, carriers often get a little lax on cracking down because they tend to pull in 30% or more of the profits made.

Part of the reason the AT&T T-Mobile deal collapsed (aside from it being one of the most anti-competitive telecom deals ever proposed) was AT&T's hubris -- which ranged from paying random non-telecom related groups to parrot support, to the glib commentary of their top lobbying and policy guru, Jim Cicconi. Throughout the deal, Jim was consistently upset how nobody was willing to believe his made up facts -- like how eliminating T-Mobile would somehow magically increase competition while lowering wireless data prices.