Remember Nancy Pelosi’s infamous statement about congressional approval of ObamaCare — “We have to vote on it before we see what’s in it”?
We’re getting a bad sequel in the Federal Communications Commission’s secretive overhaul of Internet regulation. Call it, “We have to approve it before you get to see it.”
The policy specifics of the FCC’s decision impacting so-called “Net neutrality” are troubling in and of themselves
The Internet — which arose out of a US Department of Defense program linking various computers — has been lightly regulated over the several decades in which it evolved into the personal and commercial backbone of the Information Age.
The upcoming FCC change would re-classify the Internet as a public utility.
This would allow the heavy hand of government to determine how much and how fast broadband data is delivered to consumers. The likeliest casualty of such a move would be the incredible Internet-driven innovations of the last two decades.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler resisted this change until — according to The Wall Street Journal — President Obama and the White House began pressuring the supposedly independent agency. Wheeler publicly surrendered in a Journal op-ed last week.
As bad as this is on the merits, even worse is how the public will learn the details. The answer is it won’t, at least until it is too late — because the FCC isn’t releasing the full copy of its 332-page Net-neutrality assessment until after the commissioners vote on it later this month.
Bad enough this is almost exactly how ObamaCare was passed. Worse will be if the FCC ends up doing to the Internet what ObamaCare did to health care.