Law Journal Succumbs to Doublespeak on Intenet Deregulation v. Regulation
The article by Shannon P. Duffy appeasing in Law.com’s
3rd Circuit Upholds FCC’s Deregulation of High-Speed Internet Access succumbs to the regulation/de-regulation doublespeak pressed by the Internet regulators. I would have hoped a law rag would have been sharp enough to avoid such gullibility.
This is not at all a ruling in favor of deregulation. To the contrary, it is a ruling authorizing private regulation of the Internet. Moreover, private regulation in this space is much more dangerous than government regulation because it works. The government can’t do much at all to regulate the Internet, thanks in large measure to the First Amendment and thanks in no small measure to the fact that the government does not have any physical control over the transport layer. But the major ISPs do have such control, and are not bound by the First Amendment. In short, this ruling says, in plain English, “Whereas the government may not and cannot regulate communications over the Internet that are protected from suppression by the First Amendment, we hereby free those of you who have the power to suppress freedom of speech to go ahead and do so.”
October 19th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
[…] My lawyer’s a great guy, but I disagree with him from time to time. […]
October 20th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
I’m Shannon Duffy and while I hope I’m not thin-skinned and am open to hearing criticisms of my writing, I find this a bit confusing.
You say my article “succumbs to the regulation/de-regulation doublespeak pressed by the Internet regulators.” You later say “This is not at all a ruling in favor of deregulation. To the contrary, it is a ruling authorizing private regulation of the Internet.”
I think perhaps you simply don’t understand what the term “deregulation” means. Regulation, as a term of art, is something only the government does. If the government imposes rules on X and later eliminates some or all of those rules, that’s deregulation. Your term “private regulation” is an oxymoron.
Here, the government (acting through the FCC) had imposed regulations on telephone companies mandating that they provide access to their competitors. That rule was later eliminated. That’s deregulation.
In the court’s opinion, one of the critical sections begins: “Petitioners argue that the FCC’s blanket deregulation of wireline broadband Internet access service violates …”
Ergo, I was not succumbing to doublespeak, as you say, but simply describing what the court had done in the same terms the court itself had used.