You are here Questions for Free Press' proposed "New Direction for US Broadband Policy"
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Mon, 2009-05-11 18:39
Free Press' just released a new report with its sweeping recommendations for a complete overhaul of the nation's broadband strategy. Asserting that "digital deregulation failed," FreePress in essence proposes a complete top-to-bottom do-over of over fifteen years of bipartisan communications policy.
The report prompts some fundamental questions for FreePress to answer.
Is FreePress calling for:
- A reversal of the seminal open-access policy trajectory set by the Clinton-Gore Administration and the Kennard FCC in deciding to rely on market forces and not impose broadband open access on cable in the late 1990's?
- A reversal of fifteen years of consistent bipartisan policy consensus, throughout Democratic and Republican Congresses and Adminstrations, to not regulate or tax the Internet?
- Regulating broadband, which the FCC has declared a competitive market, as if it were a monopoly market?
- Reopening and relitigating foundational pro-competition issues decided with unanimous bipartisan FCC votes and upheld in Federal court?
- Discouraging current private investment and deployment in broadband so it can be replaced in the future by taxpayer-funded/financed broadband infrastructure?
- America to really fall behind other countries in broadband penetration by chilling current private investment, so that after few years of stagnated private broadband investment there will eventually be a real broadband problem to fix?
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