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Brendan Carr

The Federal Government to “Micromanage Nearly Every Aspect of How the Internet Functions,” – FCC Commissioner
"The Biden Administration’s plan empowers the FCC to regulate every aspect of the Internet sector for the first time ever"

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The purpose of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ostensibly was to safeguard citizens from the telecommunications sector, but the commission has long since been considered compromised by the deep administrative state.

Author’s note – For a briefing on why I would use the term “compromised” to describe the FCC, feel free to read this document at your leisure.

The agency’s questionable history aside, the current FCC commissioner Brendan Carr is due some props as he recently issued a warning that should send shock waves throughout the country.

Carr said in a statement on Monday that,

“President Biden’s plan hands the Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the country. Never before, in the roughly 40-year history of the public Internet, has the FCC (or any federal agency for that matter) claimed this degree of control over it. Indeed, President Biden’s plan calls for the FCC to apply a far-reaching set of government controls that the agency has not applied to any technology in the modern era, including Title II common carriers,”

A draft of the FCC order implementing President Biden’s plan is available here.

Carr also drew attention to the critical FCC decision on whether to adopt the president’s plan which is scheduled for next week.

“Congress never contemplated the sweeping regulatory regime that President Biden asked the FCC to adopt—let alone authorized the agency to implement it,”

Carr clarified in his statement that the Biden administration’s economic policies are to blame for the “skyrocketing costs of building Internet infrastructure in this country” and the “broadband policies that are failing.” Due to “regulatory red tape,” the FCC has “needlessly blocked and delayed new broadband infrastructure builds” even though it has been looking to expand “new, 5G services.”

The commissioner also stated that President Joe Biden is pressuring the FCC to approve “a one-page section of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Infrastructure Act),” which contains “new rules of breathtaking scope, all in the name of ‘digital equity’.”

“For the first time ever, those rules would give the federal government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions—from how [internet service providers] allocate capital and where they build, to the services that consumers can purchase; from the profits that ISPs can realize and how they market and advertise services to the discounts and promotions that consumers can receive. Talk about central planning,”

If passed, among many other things, the FCC would be able to control every ISP’s service termination terms, use of customer credit, account history, credit checks, and account termination for the first time.

“There is no path to complying with this standardless regime. It reads like a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university’s Soviet Studies Department…

…The Biden Administration’s plan empowers the FCC to regulate every aspect of the Internet sector for the first time ever. The plan is motivated by an ideology of government control that is not compatible with the fundamental precepts of free market capitalism.”

 

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