Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) came under fire for making a ruling that many consider outside its authority. Without levying a fine, it charged that Comcast violated federal policy when it interfered with a file-sharing application used by consumers. This new plot twist in the Net neutrality story should remind everyone that when it comes to new technologies, government failure is a bigger menace than market failure.
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The FCC is a nonprofit entity, and, therefore, criteria such as power and politics — not money — shape its motives. In a world in which telecommunications has morphed into a simple Internet application, the FCC becomes irrelevant if it doesn’t govern the Net. This gives bureaucrats from both parties incentives to make new rules in order to stay in the game, as they did with their Net neutrality “principles” in 2005.
However, incentives to stay in power are not necessarily aligned with incentives to do what’s right for consumers. That should give everyone reason to consider carefully what is likely to happen if FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is successful in intervening to control the Internet’s future.
That would be a future in which lobbyists, interest groups, and power-hungry politicians controlled what consumers could access on the Net. It would be a future that looked a lot like the regulation-heavy telecommunications past.
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