Companies Win, Consumers Lose in McCain's Tech Plan

[Joanne98]

John McCain's tech plan it finally out, although not obviously so. Tech isn't listed as an "issue" under his home page issue list, nor is the plan found under the news or press release sections. It's buried here.

John McCain's Internet is a strange and wondrous world, not like the Internet most people experience. It's a place not for innovation and creativity, but one to be controlled by the telephone and cable companies. McCain's view of the Internet is an Internet is largely infiltrated by pirates and filled with dangers that require government protections and enforcement. His policy is filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. That's not surprising, considering that he took a variety of policy positions on the crucial question whether his friends in the telecom business should have been given immunity for spying on Americans. At different times, he supported and questioned it, then skipped the crucial vote entirely. He was not alone in doing this, but it takes on added significance when combined with this policy plan.

As we expected, it's the product of a team of advisors that gives lip service to consumers, but when the rubber meets the road, it's the corporations that get most of the goodies. Somewhat like the McCain campaign more generally, it also contains some internal contradictions that muddy the waters that make this look like the product of a group that was trying very hard to make some attempts to appear consumer-friendly, when it's mostly corporate-friendly.

For example, there's this headline in the plan: "John McCain Has Fought to Keep the Internet Free From Government Regulation." A little further on down, there's this sub-head: "When Regulation Is Warranted, John McCain Acts." So some regulation is fine, but some is not. And therein is the key to McCain's philosophy of the Internet, such as it is, particularly when combined with a separate part of McCain's platform, on privacy and security. The philosophy is that business can do what it wants to control what happens online, but consumers are on their own.

McCain's "innovation" platform sets out four principles that his chief advisor, former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell, put forward as guidelines when he headed the agency. Consumers have the rights to access services and content, attach equipment and have a choice of service providers. When Powell was chairman, he never bothered actually to enforce any of those. He wanted them simply to be advisory. It was left to his successor, current Chairman Kevin Martin, acting with two current Democratic commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, to make those principles stick by acting against Comcast, which throttled consumer traffic and then lied about it.

Here's the biggest internal contradiction: "John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like 'net-neutrality,' but rather he believes that an open marketplace with a variety of consumer choices is the best deterrent against unfair practices." Over the last 70 years, consumers were protected by law from telephone companies discriminating in the carriage of their calls and messages. Powell's FCC lifted those protections for the Internet. Restoring a well-established consumer-protection principle is hardly a new or unique concept, except for the telephone and cable companies, which want unfettered access to everything the consumers put online. Net Neutrality is not prescriptive regulation. It's consumer protection, the kind of thing McCain says elsewhere he likes.

Continued>>>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-brodsky/companies-win-consumers-l_b_119181.html

Highlights. Net Neutrality bad... ACTA Good...Big media very good.

[Hope And Change]

1. K & R!