ReasonedResponse.com

I was struck this morning by yet another example of why law school students should be forced to take course in economics, business management and common sense.  This time by way of a blog entry by Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Michigan (and, frighteningly, a board member of ICANN) who begins with the statement:

"Let's say that providing communications infrastructure is an inherent function of a state."

Her blog goes on to make the usual nonsense conjectures that seem to always lead to the government seizing control of broadband so that network operators don't get too much power.  The implied threat is that if they do get such power, consumers and governments would be so powerless to stop them that we would be forced to accept...well, who knows? 

Just for the record:

1)  Private companies have no obligation, implied or otherwise, to protect First Amendment free speech.  The Bill of Rights does not apply to private entities.  The Telecommunications Act of 1996 does encourage network operators to censor any content they find objectionable, and protects them in doing so.  Amazing how the "experts" in cyberlaw never seem to have read that section of law.  Or simply overlook it as an inconvenient truth.

2)  Countries suffering under communist and other totalitarian governments seize the assets of private companies under the excuse that it is for the common good.  We are neither a communist nor a totalitarian government, and should not act like one.  BTW, our communications networks are the envy of the world today, and most of the world is busy tearing down their state-owned monopolies in order to emulate our success.  If we are less successful than we once were, you can blame it on a Congress that just can't stop regulating our successes away.

3)  Trying to pass off socialist political theory and bizarre imaginings as any kind of scholarly discourse on management of the Internet generally fails -- as does this one -- because it stops short once we turn everything over to the government.  Since the goal is not to produce a better, faster or cheaper Internet, but only to destroy the telephone and cable companies, there is never a discussion of how things will be improved, if at all, in the New World Order.  No discussion of who will actually run the networks, or whether they are qualified to do so, or even whether consumers will have a voice in the choices they are offered.

My good friend and USIIA chairman Dennis Hayes, whose work on the Hayes modem and ringset made him a true pioneer of the Internet, is often fond of noting that the workings of a free market are ugly, frequently slow and sometimes unfair.  But they are always a better option than markets controlled by the goverment.

Amen.