Op-Ed

[Commentary] At the close of June 15’s broadcast of CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley took aim at both sides of the political spectrum — and the leaders and talking heads who inhabit them — regarding overheated rhetoric that is now in the spotlight in the wake of the Congressional baseball shooting. “Too many leaders and political commentators who set an example for us to follow have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric that has, it should be no surprise, has led us to violence,” Pelley noted. “As children, we’re taught words will never hurt me,” the anchor stated. “But when you think about it, violence almost always begins with words. In Twitter world, we’ve come to believe that our first thought, is our best thought. It’s past time for all of us — presidents, politicians, reporters, citizens, all of us — to pause, to think again.”

[Commentary] The political left is very vocal in their criticism of science deniers. After all, the denial of reality ultimately harms humanity. Unfortunately, the left has a similar blind spot when it comes to regulation. Economic fundamentals also have a claim on reality, a claim we ignore at our peril. This blind spot is on stark display over so-called network neutrality rules. By forbidding Internet bandwidth pricing to reflect economic costs, they are engaging in a form of science denial. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai is absolutely right in his efforts to undo these delusional and ultimately harmful Obama-era rules.

[Barry Fagin is senior fellow in technology policy at the Independence Institute]

[Commentary] What makes for a persuasive comment that can help build a record to preserve network neutrality rules? Here are four suggestions:
1. Write about yourself and how the net neutrality rules have affected you
2. Write about what you understand you are buying when you purchase broadband Internet access
3. Write about the choices you have (or don’t) for broadband Internet access
4. Write about what role you think the Federal Communications Commission should have in overseeing the market for broadband Internet access

Don’t worry if you’ve already filed a comment that doesn’t address these issues – you can file new comments addressing these and/or other issues. Over the course of a proceeding like this, companies and organizations on both sides of the debate will file many comments, including after they visit FCC Commissioners and staff to make their cases. So don’t hesitate - we need to build the strongest possible record if the net neutrality rules, and an open Internet, are to be preserved.

[Gigi Sohn is a Fellow with Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law & Policy, the Open Society Foundations and Mozilla. She served as Counselor to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler from November 2013-December 2016.]

[Commentary] After decades of failed efforts to enact “regulatory reform” bills, Congress appears to be within a few votes of approving reform legislation that would strip Americans of important legal protections, induce regulatory sclerosis and subject agencies that enforce the nation’s laws and regulations to potentially endless litigation. This is not reform.

These bills would sabotage agency regulation with legislative monkey wrenches. Key compromises about agency power and procedures, worked out under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, would be discarded by these overwhelmingly anti-regulatory bills. And because they would be statutory changes, not mere presidential edicts, these changes would likely long outlive the Trump administration. Independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, long protected from direct presidential control, would now be subject to this bill’s requirements and oversight by the information and regulatory affairs office.

[Buzbee is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a founding member-scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform]

[Commentary] On June 12, the 9th Circuit became the latest court to block President Donald Trump's revised travel ban, his second attempt to limit travel from six majority Muslim nations. The decision was not a surprise, as the Trump administration has not had much luck in the courtroom. But its timing – just after former FBI director James Comey testified before Congress and just before Attorney General Jeff Sessions does – reveals that even in the Trump era, there are places where words still matter.

Since Trump launched his presidential bid two years ago, the power of words and facts has been in doubt. As candidate and now president, Trump has lavished Americans with promises that he immediately broke. He has spread lies and conspiracies that are breathtaking in their obvious falseness. He has hurled accusations, threats and slurs that would have been unimaginable for any presidential candidate in the last several decades. And despite – or maybe because – of it all, he won the presidency. So Americans could be forgiven for thinking we now live in a world where facts, promises and words no longer matter, where the president can say whatever he likes without consequences. Only it turns out, there are still some situations where words matter a great deal.

[She is an assistant professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs and a research associate at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.]

[Commentary] Admittedly, “infrastructure” might not immediately come to mind when you think “Federal Communications Commission.” But maybe it should. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai often begins and ends his speeches talking about infrastructure investment. The analogy may be getting shop-worn, but in this day and age, who can doubt that reliable high-speed broadband networks are as crucial a component of the nation’s infrastructure as last century’s interstate highways.

Eliminating public utility-like regulation in the Restoring Internet Freedom rulemaking is an important part of the FCC’s focus on spurring greater investment by our nation’s internet service providers. And the pending proposals to encourage more investment in high-speed wireline and wireless broadband networks by eliminating, or at least curtailing, unnecessary or costly regulatory impediments have the same objective. Spurring private sector investment by internet service providers in high-speed broadband networks should be viewed as a key part of the nation’s infrastructure program. And the FCC should be viewed as a key infrastructure agency.

[Randolph J. May is president of the Free State Foundation]

[Commentary] The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear Carpenter v. United States, a case on whether the Fourth Amendment protects historical cell-site records. In this post, I want to focus on a small but potentially important part of the Carpenter litigation: How should an originalist Justice vote in the case?

There are many different flavors of originalism, of course, and originalist arguments often can be used to argue for different outcomes. But in this post I want to discuss one originalist argument that I think is significant. Let’s start with the obvious: The Framers could not have imagined a world of cell-site records. And the original public meaning of the Fourth Amendment is open to a wide range of interpretations at different levels of generality. With that said, the text of the Fourth Amendment does have an important clue about what the Fourth Amendment was originally understood to mean that might be important to the Carpenter case.

[Kerr is the Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor at The George Washington University Law School]

[Commentary] Network neutrality rules are needed to protect individuals against cable companies and other giant internet service providers that want to put their own profits ahead of the public interest in a free and open internet where anybody can communicate and compete on an equal playing field. They want network neutrality protections removed so they can tilt the rules of the game in their own favor, and in favor of other giant internet companies that have the deep pockets to pay them for special treatment online.

Network neutrality protections are good not only for consumers, but they’re also vital to ensure competition and innovation in all the tens of thousands of competitive marketplaces that depend on an even playing field—such as travel services. They are also vital to ensure that everyone can communicate without interference by those who run the communications network.

[Jay Stanley is senior policy analyst for the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.]

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rollback of its 2015 Open Internet Order has put the term “net neutrality” back in the political zeitgeist. The phrase itself is more strategic marketing than precise meaning, but understanding that all it really means is heavy-handed government regulation of the internet makes it clear that net neutrality policy is bad for broadband consumers.

The net neutrality debate has little to do with making the internet open for users to go where they wish online. Americans have always enjoyed that liberty, even before the Open Internet Order was passed. Internet service providers have every incentive to provide that freedom to their customers.

[Jessica Melugin is an adjunct fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington]

[Commentary] Over the last month, the Federal Communications Commission received 2.6 million public comments critical of Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to roll back President Obama’s "network neutrality" rules. This outpouring of public sentiment must be evidence of participatory democracy at it best, right? Not quite. A sizable percentage of these comments appear to be fake. What the net neutrality comment debacle underscores is that the Internet age may mean the collapse of the public comment process, at least for significant public policy issues.

Sophisticated bots and automated comment platforms can create thousands and thousands of comments from senders who may or may not be real. Most rulemaking pertains to subject matter that is less widely-watched than net neutrality, and usually concerns only a small sliver of the public. The public comment process has some virtues and should continue. It is time to recognize, however, that for rulemaking over issues on the scale of net neutrality, with entrenched and vocal participants on both sides of the aisle, the public comment process has become a farce.

[Peter Flaherty is president of the National Legal and Policy Center.]