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FCC, Carriers Close To Largely Empty Neutrality Agreement
All that's left is a little fauxsumer showmanship...

Industry analyst Dave Burstein drops us a line to note that all the top lobbyists for the industry's heavyweights (AT&T, Verizon, the NCTA) met with the FCC over the weekend and are very close to getting a deal done on network neutrality. With the phone companies now essentially part of our country's intelligence system, Burstein suggests that top Verizon and AT&T execs and lobbyists were able to put pressure on Chief Of Staff Rahm Emanuel to get a deal done. The deal, according to Burstein is little more than "symbolic and essentially a fig leaf."

quote:
Under pressure like that, Julius has already agreed to almost everything Cicconi (AT&T's top lobbyist) really wants, including loopholes wide enough to carry 350 TV channels. K & A say there is still some opposition so that nothing is final and that the public interest groups are ready to assail Julius. Meanwhile, Verizon and Google are discussing a separate peace that will make the FCC irrelevant. This one is about power and money, not principle. The likely outcome is an agreement that will allow everyone to say noble things, will allow Julius to look himself in the mirror, and will essentially have no substance.
The approaching deal (confirmed by a Stifel Nicolaus analyst report) comes after months of closed door meetings with carriers, which completely ran contrary to the FCC's promise of well-documented transparency. An empty network neutrality agreement would mimic our largely toothless national broadband plan, paying lip service to consumer-friendly concepts, but delivering no real substantive policy or rules. With the neutrality deal essentially done, all that's left is for the FCC and carriers to put on a good fauxsumer show over the next few weeks.

Neutrality rules might not be necessary in the first place if the FCC was willing to stand up to carriers and tackle the sector's primary problem: a lack of substantive competition in most markets. Real competition would allow consumers to vote with their wallets, organically punishing carriers who engage in poor behavior of any time (be it unreasonable capping plans, unreasonable throttling, or preferential treatment of their own content).

Instead, FCC boss Genachowski appears completely incapable of making tough decisions or taking solid positions on any subject (right around this time last year we noted how this might be a problem). The result (aside from some genuinely good new data-collection efforts) is empty policy with endless loopholes, something that certainly helps carriers more than consumers. In the end, Genachowski's efforts to please everybody may wind up pleasing nobody, though AT&T may be happy in believing they've put to bed a debate they themselves started back in 2005.

Update: We've got more detail here, for those interested.

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Regulatory Capture

The proper term is Regulatory Capture.

And it's not just the FCC; It's happening on a much grander scale at the SEC, CFTC, and congress - all of whom have been "captured" by Wall Street and the big banks. Financial regulatory reform is a joke with just as many loopholes for the banks as Net Neutrality has for carriers.

Goldman Sachs recently got off almost scot free with a $550 million slap on the wrist. All that matters is the greedy Wall Street psychopaths get richer at the expense of Main Street while congress scrambles to line their pockets at our expense. Eventually it all collapses and we wake up one day and bow to our masters in Asia.

Look around you at all the corruption, the greed, political stupidity, dumbed-down populace (thank you, media and public education system), the rotting infrastructure, and the brain-dead garbage that passes for modern entertainment.
Just as Rome fell ...

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re ··· _capture