UPDATE: The FCC has now moved the deadline to Friday, July 18 because the agency that wants the authority to regulate the whole Internet can’t keep its own comment website online.
It’s deadline day for the current round of comments to the FCC on their proposal to regulate the Internet.
American Commitment activists have sent about 14,000 comments through our petition at StopInternetRegulation.org (but don’t worry if you missed out — there will be a reply comment period to answer the demands for government regulation from angry liberals; more on that soon).
We also have an op-ed in today’s Birmingham News criticizing recent comments from U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus, the first and we hope only, Republican to advocate for converting the Internet into a government-controlled public utility:
It’s known as the “nuclear option” on Wall Street because it would so thoroughly obliterate private investment in broadband companies that it would be something like total destruction. It refers to the reclassification, urged by liberal extremist groups, of broadband Internet services as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. An idea only the most extreme liberal Democrats could embrace, right? Sadly not. Republican Spencer Bachus of Alabama, chairman of the antitrust subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, recently told a reporter: “The easiest thing to do might be Title II.” Shocking.
Read the whole thing here.
Finally, we joined a broad coalition of free-market and conservative groups in a joint filing urging the FCC not to move forward with regulating the Internet. You can read that filing here.
The single most important takeway from all this is this: broadband Internet is an amazing economic, political, and social success story in this country, and it happened because government took a hands off approach and allowed the free market to work. Let’s not allow government to mess that up.