Flowers For Socrates

 

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FCC chair, Ajit “Pay Toilet” Pai, attempted recently to refute claims that “repealing utility-style regulation will destroy the Internet as we know it and harm innovation” by saying Net Neutrality would be ensured by corporate transparency (see “trust us, we’re making money from you and we’re not even bankers”).

Here’s the thing, it’s a utility, full-stop.

In most of its configurations it still uses all or part of the same transit corridors as other utilities. Despite the invisibility of wireless, the transmission system still has the structure of wireline networks and invariably has that structure (see coverage maps which mimic the roadway network).

Eliminating utility-style(sic) regulation will introduce de facto congestion pricing and resegregates bandwidth in favor of corporate greed that will have a disproportionate effect on the digital divide(s).

Such pricing sounds OK when one thinks about reducing negative externalities like air quality and fossil-fuel consumption, but at some moment it won’t actually finance EV development, or regulatory removal of polluting equipment. Similarly, carbon crediting is also about commodifying pollution, as if its trade would stop children getting asthma.

Because it is about acceptable and new centers for profits, and like the climate deniers, telecom industries only appear to have no negative information externalities because digital knowledge seems more fungible.

The resemblance resides in the current White House Twitler, proving how false consciousness and stupidity converge.

Given its complexity, national utility policy needs more rather than less regulation, despite Title II. Like environmental racism, it will be a matter of locational discrimination caused by the will of capital.The histories of rural electrification and rural telecom must-carry requirements are not that dissimilar, despite the growth of wireless, cable, satellite and more complex broadband infrastructure.

Reregulation to address the problem of cross-subsidies which address inequality has always been important for utilities, whether it’s home energy or telephone service to rural areas. The FCC rarely micromanages except in cases appropriate to its original mandate to reduce interference and congestion in the public interest.

The real capital surface is of course sprawled, and the space between city and country in suburban development is the actual territory where broadband profits reside.

Even as a complex geolocational construction, the electromagnetic spectrum is still a commons, however tragic.

Pai assumes that investment decline even as network infrastructure has surplus capacity suggests that it’s just about resegmenting the market to enable more speculative investment. It is about finance capital and all the capitalist lies meant to ensure profitability at the cost of alienating consumers.

More troubling is that Pai’s deregulatory claims are short-sighted at best, like most policy proposals under neoliberal capitalism, and at worst simply another speculative capital grab no different than the auctioning of spectrum in 1996.

Pai’s clumsy Republicanism fosters media oligopolies at national/regional/local levels and inhibits innovation insofar as access becomes skewed to consumption and limits small-producer broadband support. It’s not the absolute doom of the Internet, it’s just putting up more fences and getting more corporate, gated communities -— a manorial division of spectrum, where someone might shoot you if you trespass.

Like the South Sea Bubble and Trickle-Down Economics, it’s another capitalist confidence game, making the public private, because they can, and have more lawyers.

The real problem or advantage is that owning multiple digital delivery devices will have multiple profit channels for complex access (see price gouging when you’re on vacation or if you wander into an expensive neighborhood and you want to watch something streamed). The simpler example of this is why things are so expensive in convenience stores or food more pricey in airports.

Ajit “Pay Toilet” Pai’s rationale (see big lies like “market failure”) for eliminating a “creaky regulatory framework” is like saying “the Declaration of Independence is an ‘Enlightenment-era rule written by anti-government extremists’”:

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