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Kudos to Hance Haney of the Discovery Institute, who in his Tech Liberation Front blog post: "What did he say?, found another big misrepresentation whopper in Professor Lessig's lecture to the FCC on net neutrality last week.

• Hance pointed out in elegant detail, that Professor Lessig took the extensive quotes about the important value of end-to-end arrchitecture from former FCC Chief Economist Gerald Foulhaber in 2000 -- completely out-of-context.

  • Hance: "Normally when you quote someone extensively but selectively and you’re making a different (arguably opposite) point, you acknowledge that."

• Like I explained in my previous post "Bringing sunlight to Professor Lessig's Orwellian Doublespeak lecture at the FCC" I identified three clear instances of Professor Lessig misreprenting the views of others or weaknesses in his net neutrality argument.  

  • Hance's keen memory and ear identified a big fourth example.

  • I'll bet others heard additional misrepresentations or half-truths in Professor Lessig's FCC lecture -- as four misrepresentation examples clearly represent a pattern of not shooting straight to the public on net neutrality.

Not only was I stunned that the FCC allowed Professor Larry Lessig to lecture for a half an hour at the FCC's en banc hearing at Stanford, I was even more stunned no one challenged his blatant misrepresentation and Orwellian "doublespeak" in support of net neutrality.

• Remember in George Orwell's "1984," how "Big Brother" communicated that: "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance  is strength" -- creating an upside-down-world where if an idea is repeated enough times... it somehow becomes true?

Here are three of the Orwellian "doublespeak" gems from Lessig's lecture at the FCC en banc hearing:

1. "Adam Smith" would have favored net neutrality regulation because all companies aspire to be "monopolists."
2. The "burden of proof" is on those who don't want to change the law to mandate net neutrality.
3. Being "conservative" means supporting FCC regulation of the Internet.

First, I literally could not believe my ears when Professor Lessig had the unmitigated gall to blatantly misrepresent in his lecture that if Adam Smith were to talk to the FCC that day, that Adam Smith would find a quote from his laissez-faire, free-market tome "Wealth of Nations" -- to somehow defend Professor Lessig's call for preemptive FCC regulation of the Internet. 

The wisdom and clarity of thought prize at the FCC's enbanc hearing at Stanford goes to --- FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell!

I urge you to take a few moments and read the following excerpt from Commissioner McDowell's statement yesterday -- it really gets to the heart of the matter of what the appropriate role is for the FCC in broadband network management issues.

"...In their joint press announcement, Comcast and BitTorrent expressed the view that “these technical issues can be worked out through private business discussions without the need for government intervention.”

Self-appointed Information Commons messiah Larry Lessig and his Free Press acolyte Ben Scott, advance a slew of "beliefs" that they assiduously proselytize wherever they can gather an audience.

FreePress' antagonistic and borderline hysterical response to the legitimate consumer-friendly progress made in the Comcast-Pando agreement to lead a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" shows FreePress' and the net neutrality movement's true colors and suggests that they are not interested in really advancing their stated goals, but in scoring political points and advancing their broader political agenda. They don't seem interested in solutions, because it appears that they are in the business creating and grandstanding about problems. 

Amazing that FreePress and SaveTheInternet had nothing good to say about this breakthrough agreement that finds common ground to start working towards what FreePress et al say they care about. Any reasonable person can see their are positive developments here and progress being made. See my post on this agreement highlighting its significance.

• If Net neutrality proponents were genuinely interested in achieving or making progress towards their stated goals, they would have found something ositive to say about the clear progress the agreement made towards their stated goals and not had a knee jerk ad hominem attack that impugned the integrity of Comcast and Pando Networks.

As I said in my post, no good deed goes unpunished.

Seems like another observer agrees with this take:

Successful Internet musician, Damian Kulash wrote for the New York Times, the standard pro-net neutrality op ed -- Beware the New Thing.

• It looks like its was ghost-drafted by the FreePress/Moveon.org media machine, because it lip-synched SaveTheInternet's standard chorus -- that because the monopoly phone system was regulated as a common carrier... all internet service providers should be regulated like common carriers!

There are two big flaws in that logic.

It was very welcome, but not surprising news, that FCC Chairman Martin and a majority of the FCC plan to deny eBay-Skype's petition to apply 1960's "Carterfone" monopoly regulations on today's wireless competitors.

This was not a close call. Carterfone regulations were appropriate forty years ago with a monopoly and no competition. However, dusting off ancient regulations for a bygone monopoly era have no business or relevance today. 

The facts are that Americans enjoy more wireless competition than most any country in the world, enjoy the lowest or near lowest wireless prices in the world, and use about four times more wireless minutes than our european counterparts, because of the dramatically lower prices -- all per the American Consumer Institute. 

• The market is serving consumers excellently, and vastly better than regulators could ever hope to.

The Skype petition is an excellent evidence that the net neutrality movement does not believe in competition policy or a free market Internet, but believe in a government managed Internet.

• The FCC majority rightfully understands that government control and regulation of the Internet would be an unmitigated disaster for all concerned.  

Despite Japan having some of the fastest and cheapest broadband in the world, they still have to worry about network congestion and need to manage their networks and shape traffic, according to Adam Peake, a fellow at the International University of Japan who spoke yesterday at the Freedom to Connect Conference.

The takeaway here is that many in the net neutrality movement maintain that there is no need to manage the network if providers would just add more capacity.

• The Japan experience is powerful evidence of the fallacy of that argument.
• Experience shows that usage can often fill whatever capacity is made available.

Peake also explained that there is a pernicious p-2-p program called Winny, which is a major culprit in the network congestion and which is near universally reviled because it is one of those pernicious p-2-p programs that give all p-2-p a bad name because the protocol routinely makes the private content on users' hard drives available for identity theives and fraudsters.

Two leading proponents of net neutrality, believe the push for net neutrality is akin to FDR's pushing for the "New Deal," which was the penultimate Big Government, wealth redistribution effort in U.S. history.   

We learn this candid admission of true beliefs from the Washington Post, which today lionized Ben Scott, the amiable leader of activist organization Free Press, in an article entitled: "Net Neutrality's Quiet Crusader."  

• "Scott's kindred spirit at the FCC might be Democratic commissioner Michael J. Copps, also a student of history who recently read a biography on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Scott and Copps recently bonded over the book, drawing comparisons between the New Deal and net neutrality."

• ""There have been policy moments in the past when the market has been shaped by decisions made in Washington -- radio in the 1930s, television in the 1950s and cable in the 1980s. That moment is now for the Internet," said Scott..."

Let's review the history here that Mr. Scott waxes nostalgically about. Radio in 1930's, TV in the 1950's, and cable in the 1980's -- was about Washington "shaping them market" by regulating these technologies and businesses much more than they were before. 

I was surprised and concerned to read in Comm Daily today that the FCC's broadband data collection rulemaking "is expected to swap the FCC minimum speed for broadband -- 200 kbps -- for a tiered approach. The lowest tier would set 768 kbps as the minimum speed, an FCC source said."

• I certainly hope this is not the case, as it could have a ton of negative unintended consequences which I will outline below.

How could changing the baseline minimum definition of what is broadband turn out to be anti-competition and undermine the universal availability of broadband?