Congress Shall Make No Law . . . But Regulators Act Anyway
Lovers of free speech should feel their stomachs turn when they look at the actions of the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission these days.
Not that they took a sharp turn with the Obama administration, or with the chairmanships of Jon Leibowitz or Jules Genachowski. These are run-of-the-mill bureaucracies, constantly reaching for new powers, nevermind even constitutional limits on the federal government’s authority.
Item 1: Blogger, You’re an Advertiser Now
Via the L.A. Times blog, the FTC issued a guidance document yesterday requiring bloggers who write testimonials about products to disclose large gifts or payments, or they will run afoul of the FTC’s regulations on advertising.
Is that the right thing to do? Yep. Is that an appropriate thing to require in federal law? Absolutely not.
The FTC is putting itself in the business of guaranteeing the veracity of speech and the honesty and straightforwardness of bloggers. “No” means no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.
The “protection” in this regulatory scheme encourages consumers to be supine and irresponsible. State law should deal with frauds as they occur. There should be no law barring or limiting paid endorsements — certainly not a federal law.
Item 2: An Establishment of the Press?
Via the Examiner, it probably didn’t occur to the framers of the constitution to bar the government from establishing its own press, so they didn’t do that in the First Amendment. But we’re heading down that road, and the FTC wants to take us there.
In early December, it will hold a “workshop” called ”From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”
Here’s an idea for a “workshop”: Taking the Budget of the Federal Trade Commission and Giving it Back to Taxpayers.
Item 3: Just a Modest Takeover of the Communications Infrastructure
As discussed here several times before, FCC Chairman Genachowski has proposed to regulate the terms on which Internet service providers supply broadband services to the public. It’s pretty much the same thing as regulating how printing presses work, or the delivery decisions of newspapers.
The federal government is specifically disabled from regulating speech and the press in the constitution. But in various ways the regulators at the FCC and FTC have talked themselves into the role of censor.
Enough of this unconstitutional consumer coddling. It’s time to shut these agencies down and restore the funds that support them to American taxpayers. Now that would be a consumer protection!
An early version of this post collapsed the FTC and FCC together. Author Jim Harper swears he knows the difference and claims he was briefly blinded with rage at unconstitutional government. Jim thanks the Cato@Liberty reader who slapped him around, getting him focused once again on *happily* railing against unconstitutional government.
Is This Intervention Necessary?
So asks the Washington Post in a cogent editorial about FCC Chairman Jules Genachowski’s speech proposing to regulate the terms on which broadband service is provided. (More from TLJ, Julian Sanchez, and me.) The WaPo piece nicely dismantles the few incidents and arguments that underlie Genachowski’s call for regulation.
As the debate about “‘net neutrality” regulation continues, I imagine it will move from principled arguments, such as whether the government should control communications infrastructure, to practical ones: Will limitations on ISPs’ ability to manage their networks cause Internet brown-outs and failures? (This is what Comcast was trying to avoid when it ham-handedly degraded the use of the BitTorrent protocol on its network.) Will regulation bar ISPs from shifting costs to heavy users, cause individual consumers to pay more, and hasten a move from all-you-can-eat to metered Internet service? We’ll have much to discuss.
TLJ on Genachowski’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Speech
TechLawJournal is a consistently high-quality subscription service that provides news, records, and analysis of legislation, litigation, and regulation affecting the computer, Internet, communications and information technology sectors. It reported this morning on FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s speech proposing to regulate the provision of Internet service. The TLJ piece includes background that I think might benefit Cato@Liberty readers wishing to understand the issues better, so I asked for and received permission to republish it here.
[TLJ Report after the jump]
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