Business World Washington Can’t Stop Itself President Obama faces an emergency: How to keep net neutrality alive as a political issue despite its lack of salience in the real world. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Nov. 11, 2014 7:00 p.m. ET 24 COMMENTS Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, got his marching orders Monday, via YouTube, when President Obama called for the Internet to be reclassified as a public utility. Never mind that the FCC is nominally an independent agency or that doing what the president asks involves throwing out long-standing precedent. Never mind that this approach would solve no known problem, not even the nonproblem of net neutrality. As Robert Litan of Brookings put it: “Even if the FCC agrees to impose the price, non-discrimination, and other forms of common carrier regulation on ISPs, Title II reclassification would not necessarily ban paid prioritization.” Broadband is among the most popular, fast-growing, profitable products any business sells. Why would companies that sell it provoke fights with customers and regulators by behaving in ways that deprive customers of what is by now everyone’s clear and settled expectations of how the product should behave? They wouldn’t. Ludicrously phrased was a New York Times report on Monday that commended Mr. Obama for putting the “full weight of his administration behind an open and free Internet, calling for a strict policy of so-called net neutrality and formally opposing deals in which content providers like Netflix would pay huge sums to broadband companies for faster access to their customers.” What Netflix paid to Comcast was a fraction of the cost Netflix avoided when it stopped delivering its service through a third-party carrier in favor of a direct connection to Comcast. That’s all that happened in this misconstrued episode, the routine distortion of which has become a sad commentary on the intelligence and intellectual honesty of the media. So why is Mr. Obama promoting strict regulation? Because liberal mau-mau groups like regulation. It’s that simple: If government controls business and they control government—well, you get the idea. The needs of the liberal machine are being met, the full-time retinue of fixers, lobbyists and activists who extract rents by controlling things. You have our solemn assurance that Mr. Obama doesn’t know any more about net neutrality than slogans he could have picked up listening to Jon Stewart . Oh, and that it polls well with his “base.” This is not policy making: He has no idea what incentives guide the behavior of broadband carriers, or how regulation might affect the ability of intelligent networks to deliver a growing and potentially infinite variety of services in the future over a common digital network. Mr. Obama’s role is to attach windy rhetoric to the visionless outcomes of the visionless apparatchiks who people the policy process. They do the rest. If this strikes you as unduly cynical, sorry. This is liberalism that meets no challenge, fixes no problem. The causal oomph that drives the process is the benefits that flow to those directly involved. Congressmen can’t extract donations from the auto industry or telecom industry or health insurers if costly, consequential rules affecting those industries aren’t being drafted. Bureaucracies can’t expand. “Public interest” groups that align themselves with Democrats can’t collect scalps and orchestrate episodes in which businesses and politicians learn to fear their power. How else is the system supposed to work? Voters who tell pollsters they want an open Internet, affordable health care, higher-mileage vehicles, etc., etc. don’t stick around to see how their preferences are converted into rational means and ends. The only feedback voters render is at the polling booth, when they issue a general verdict on how the country is being run. And Mr. Obama has made it clear his exercise of executive power will be immune to such feedback. And why shouldn’t it be? Democrats are building a permanent establishment. True, when it comes to net neutrality, Mr. Obama’s intervention is likely only to prolong and deepen a stalemate that has dragged on for a decade (during which the Internet, by the way, has flourished). But even this outcome suits the machine, since the machine is really interested in process—endless, high-stakes process that swells Washington’s ranks of lawyers and lobbyists. Which brings us to a priceless quote from Chuck Todd ’s new Obama biography: “Nothing irks Mr. Obama more than the idea that he’s somehow a leftist or liberal.” Whatever “liberal” used to mean, it now means a self-interested machine of influence peddling and rent extraction. Well do we recall Cass Sunstein, Mr. Obama’s colleague at the University of Chicago, saying President Obama would surprise the world by being a “smart” regulator. What a bunch of hooey that turned out to be. Meanwhile Americans are undoubtedly tired of hearing how Washington has become America’s richest, most recession-proof area code. Net neutrality is one more example of how it got that way.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 01:49:22 +0000
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