The latest punches in the fight over Net Neutrality regulations have been between Netflix and Verizon — the video streaming giant claims Verizon’s network is slowing its users’ speeds, while the ISP claims the bottleneck is on Netflix’s end and has accused it of misleading the public. This has been accompanied by proposals for increasing existing transparency rules far beyond their current scope, and Communications Daily (subscription only) talked to TF’s Berin Szoka about the implications:
TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said he’s “a little bit cautious” about enhancing the existing transparency rule, because it would single out one sector of the economy and force “everyone on the supply chain to disclose their cost structure. That would really be quite extraordinary. It’s hard to think of another area where that happens.” A public release of company-specific data could essentially create de facto Title II common-carrier regulation price controls for the entire Web industry, he said. One possible middle ground option would be for the FCC to institute a process similar to FTC authority under Section 6 (b) of the FTC Act, which lets that agency request data from companies and then issue a report that doesn’t necessarily go into company-specific data, Szoka said. An FCC-created independent commission could also do such a study, he said.