Sununu: Protecting Net Neutrality is "Dangerous"

by: Dean Barker

Sat Apr 26, 2008 at 21:33:49 PM EDT
When I say that mild-mannered John E. is a radical, sometimes I get strange looks.  But how else to describe a person with a major role in government who does not believe in government?

Sununu's credo is little else than a marketplace beyond the reach of any type of control, and when his job as legislator gets in the way of that radical ideology, he's quick to take a pass. To use just one example, the bipartisan (Sens. Dorgan and Snowe) Internet Freedom Act, would insure that  internet service providers could not mess with content.  More from TV Technology's write-up of last week's Senate Commerce Committee meeting on this, "Martin: No New Net Neutrality Rules Needed":

Supporters of so-called "net neutrality" maintain that recent conduct of ISPs-namely Comcast's interference of BitTorrent activity-highlights the need for rules to preserve the open nature of the Internet.
Bi-partisan, a clear response to prevent another ISP like Comcast from violating net neutrality - in short, a no-brainer, right?

Well, a no-brainer unless you are guided by radical free-marketeerism (with the added bonus of enabling President Bush and his FCC chairman Kevin Martin):

Se. John Sununu argued that instead of predicting marketplace and industry activity, Congress should wait until abuses appear and then respond.

"Writing regulations based on how we think companies might behave and how we predict customers might act in response to that behavior is dangerous indeed," he said.

Dr. Robert Hahn, executive director of the Center for Regulatory and Market Studies at AEI, compared the Dorgan-Snowe proposal to trying to tell Google (he used the hypothetical company "Oogle") how much it could charge for its click-through ads. Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig explained later to the doctor that net neutrality applied to the conduct of ISPs, not content providers, and that the legislation would not affect what Web content providers could do with their own businesses.

Apparently, Comcast's abuses don't count as abuses - or something.  And passing legislation that pre-empts wrongdoing is "dangerous," but pre-emptively invading a country is A-OK. But what do I know?  And of course, the chances of Sununu listening to someone like Lawrence Lessig are slim to none, given this earlier revelation:
[Lessig] recounted feeling more than a little resentment when, in an e-mail exchange with Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.), the senator implied that Lessig's support for Net neutrality regulations stemmed from monetary nudging from the likes of Google, which was not the case.
I suppose that if you're a radical like Sununu about money, your every impulse is to suspect that other people get involved in government or governance issues only because there's some money to be made. Kind of sad, really.

Update: Blockquote trimmed a bit and source article attributed.
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