Sunday, November 19, 2023

New FCC "Digital Equity" Power Grab will be Prohibitively Costly to Americans

New FCC "Digital Equity" Power Grab will be Prohibitively Costly to Americans


The Biden administration is pushing "digital equity" on the internet in its latest FCC regulatory and "unlawful power grab." Biden's woke fingerprints are all over the FCC's proposed "utility-style regulation of the internet,"according to a letter of dissent penned by Brendan Carr, former General Counsel for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) senior Republican on the FCC. The rules are part of Biden's 2021 BiPartisan Infrastructure law. It isn't the first time Democrats tried to do this kind of thing.

Former FCC advisor and current Communications Law Professor at Michigan State University, Adam Candeub, said the first time was under President Obama through the FCC's "net neutrality/Title 2" rules. Candeub was also acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce for the National Telecommunications and Information Authority under the Trump administration in 2019 and worked for the FCC from 1998 to 2000 and currently serves as a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America.

The FCC's proposed regulatory mandate is one gargantuan step off the cliff into the abyss of massive regulatory control. To discuss the unsavory regulatory burdens that lie ahead, UncoverDC spoke with Candeub on Friday. He agrees with Carr that the FCC's new structure represents nothing more than a regulatory "power grab" that will be enormously costly and ultimately degrade the quality of service:



"It's essentially requiring equal service in every area of the country. So that means that if a company only has a certain amount of capital to servicing an area, you're going to get lower quality. For instance, because areas that are very expensive to provide services for, all the money has to go there, regardless of whether it makes any economic sense. So it's a kind of socialism. It's just going to degrade the quality for everybody because networks won't have the discretion to put the investment where it makes [the] most sense.

And you know, and it has been done sort of dishonestly, under the banner of equality, something everybody likes. The FCC is dishonestly claiming that it is promoting equity and fairness. However, the FCC is just seizing control over business decisions, funneling resources to politically preferred constituencies. [With this regulatory structure], everyone else gets worse service at a higher price. It violates the Administrative Procedure Act. Congress passed this one vague law, and the FTC seized upon it to create this elephantine regulatory structure that's going to make service more expensive for people." 


The proposed rules were published for comment in the Federal Register on Jan. 20, 2023. Comments on Oct. 6, 2023, from the Biden administration are essentially the "marching orders" that give the FCC permission "to prevent digital discrimination of access and work in concert with federal programs aimed at achieving universal broadband deployment, adoption, and usage." The FCC, in fact, has task force dedicated to "promoting equal access to the internet." Biden's marching orders are now the law of the land, pending the process that officially puts them into place. 








No comments: