While I doubt I'll ever be accused of being a supporter of Senator Hillary Clinton, I must commend her and her campaign for sound political judgement when it's due.
Understandably, the glaring exclusion of net neutrality from the Senator's Innovation agenda -- after the radical left's rhetoric claimed net neutrality was essential to "innovation" -- signals to me that the Senator and her campaign have a pretty solid, practical and intuitive understanding of sound broadband policy.
- First, broadband deployment to all Americans fastest -- is a real important and unifying national policy objective;
- trying to preemptively solve a yet-proven net neutrality problem is the opposite -- it's unnecessary and bitterly divisive.
- Second, preemptively regulating the companies that the Nation depends on to deploy broadband everywhere fastest -- with investment-destroying Net neutrality regulation -- may be the biggest single biggest policy mistake possible -- if one cares to actually encourage universal broadband deployment and competition quickly.
While I believe Senator Clinton still has significant sympathies for some of the goals of net neutrality that remain highly troubling to me, I think Matt Stoller's angry public reaction does in fact tell us something important and real about Sen. Clinton's national broadband policy.
- In this critical area of Internet policy and infrastructure investment, she appears to be staking out a more restrained, responsible and investment/consumer-friendly broadband agenda.
- In modeling her "Connect America" national broadband strategy after "the successful Connect Kentucky program which has dramatically improved broadband access" the Senator is showing the discipline of focusing on broadband policies that actually work in the real world rather than buckling to political pressure from the unreasonable NetRoots movement.
Moreover, I also commend the Clinton campaign for not falling for the bogus "innovation" rhetoric of the anti-property-rights, information commons movement, that is the political and philosphical engine of the net neutrality issue.
- By excluding net neutrality from the Senator's "Innovation" Agenda, the Clinton campaign intuitively understands that the anti-property rights and anti-corporate agenda of the information commons movement would be an unmitigated disaster for American competitiveness.
- Net neutrality and the other policies of the information commons movement would be a form of unilateral competitive disarmnament, disadvantaging American inventors, entrepreneurs and companies from being able to capture the economic gains of their innovations and investments.
- Regulating only the American part of the Internet and limiting the intellectual property rights of only American innovators and companies would turn our world-leading-techcom sector into a de facto foreign aid program advantaging Europe, China and other international competitors --
- allowing them to reap the lion's share of the benefit of American innovation and U.S. investment and leaving American consumers holding the bag.
Bottomline: Senator Clinton was wise, disciplined and responsible to resist the radical netroots/information-commons wing of her party and devise a national broadband policy that unites around what matters most:
- Promoting broadband deployment to all Americans; and
- Avoiding the balkan-izing, competitiveness-undermining, wealth-redistribution policies of the net-neutrality/information-commons movement.
Now that the Clinton campaign has put the net roots in their cage on net neutrality, lets hope she misplaces the key...
