Recent remarks by Deborah Platt Majoras caution against adopting net neutrality regulation, following the FTC's report:

Majoras said that without evidence of "market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area."

In separate remarks before a lawyers' group Wednesday, Majoras said the agency was unaware of any market failure or consumer harm in the high-speed Internet market, according to a written copy of her speech.

The net neutrality debate is often portrayed as a battle between huge ISPs and huge tech companies, and so on some level it is. You also have free-market scholars arguing against burdensome regulation (including PFF) and commons advocates arguing for regulations to ensure a "dumb pipe" that will provide no limits on end-users. But what about innocent parties trapped in the middle of this debate? Who are they, you ask? Well, how about a small broadband ISP? The net neutrality regulation proponents say they want more competition in broadband; one of those competitors posted an intriguing post on Dave Farber's Interesting People list this week. He didn't address net neutrality, but the points he raised are central to the debate.

Brett Glass of the ISP Lariat.net (serving Laramie, Wyoming) was responding to a post involving someone being kicked off of a Verizon Wireless network for using too much broadband bandwidth. He said networks are plagued by bandwidth hogs, often the result of viruses, etc., but sometimes it's caused by the actions of a single user. "The real problem," he said, "is that many consumers are unwilling to pay for the network capacity they use."

I hate to get ahead of myself with irrational exuberance, but my primary takeaway from the Aspen Summit is that there is a possible consensus that the FTC might be the appropriate institution for addressing the net neutrality issue, and broadband competition policy more generally. FTC Chairman Majoras highlighted the conference by announcing the Internet Access task force. Dick Notebaert echoed Chairman Majoras's call for the FTC to take a leadership role in the broadband market. Even my friends at Google appear inclined to consider an FTC-centric role for the net neutrality issue.
To the extent that the Summit helped forward the FTC as the rule of law regulator for the broadband marketplace, and forward the DACA approach toward regulation of the communications marketplace, I would rather audaciously submit it was a success.

I had the pleasure last evening of speaking at an America's Future Foundation event titled "Should the Government Regulate the Net?" AFF consists of conservatives or libertarians in their 20s and 30s; in just over a year I'll turn 40 and I suppose will join America's Past. But I enjoyed the AFF crowd, which filled to standing-room a banquet room in the Rayburn House Office Building. I particularly enjoyed their probing questions. In my prepared remarks I sought to address some of the hysteria surrounding the net neutrality debate, and in so doing evoked the possibility of a mutant snakehead rising out of the Potomac River, walking down the Mall and devouring the US Capitol. That, I suspect, isn't likely to happen, but neither are the scary stories we often hear, as was made clear by a fellow panelist, Heritage's James Gattuso.

A credit card authorization company fails to protect the records of individual card holders, and a data breach leads to millions of dollars in fraudulent charges. A nightmare scenario for sure, and a real one. But CardSystems (now part of Solidus Networks and operating as Pay by Touch Solutions) yesterday agreed to a multi-million dollar settlement with the FTC. It also agreed to be audited every other year by a third-party security professional for the next 20 years. (See FTC release, actual settlement and AP story by Jennifer Kerr.) So what does this all mean?

Given the eminence of the other speakers on yesterday's ABA panel regarding antitrust in the broadband world, it is not surprising that the discussion went far beyond debating various interpretations of the Supreme Court's Trinko decision. We also explored -- the Court's opinion aside -- the extent to which antitrust should serve as a backstop to FCC regulation.

But taking FCC regulation largely as given and then considering the proper role for antitrust may not go far enough; our talk raised issues that made me wish we had considered the interplay between antitrust and regulation more holistically. Given the general agreement that competitive analysis will be a critical element of the government's involvement with broadband going forward, policymakers should begin to develop consensus regarding which arm of government should conduct that analysis and why.

Kudos to the FTC for its announced multimillion dollar settlement today with ChoicePoint. (I'd use language so often seen in press releases and say "I applaud the FTC" but as I'm typing it's impossible for me to applaud.) ChoicePoint allowed the personal records of 163,000 consumers to be compromised, and the FTC says at least 800 identity theft cases resulted from that action. In the settlement, ChoicePoint will have to pay $10 million in civil penalties and another $5 million for consumer redress.

In the latest example of Internet misinformation, an e-mail is circulating on the Internet stating this:

* ALL CELL PHONE NUMBERS. The first week of January, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you may start to receive sale calls. You will be charged for these calls.

Here's what the FTC has to say:

You may have received an email telling you that your cell phone is about to be assaulted by telemarketing calls as a result of a new cell phone number database; however, that is not the case. Federal Communications Commission regulations prohibit telemarketers from using automated dialers to call cell phone numbers.

It seems a forwarded e-mail has as much chance of being accurate as a Wikipedia entry.

Todd Zywicki gets it exactly right on the incoming and departing FTC commissioners, Bill Kovacic and Orson Swindle, respectively.

This should not be taken as an endorsement of Commissioner Swindle's unfortunate affection for the Atlanta Braves, a great team whose fans don't deserve their consistent, machine-like excellence and success. As for Zywicki's revelation that the rest of The FTC is full of Yankees fans, that has caused me to reconsider my assessment of it as a "model agency." My new position is the FTC should be abolished to end this embrace with an organization which so vigorously embraces and typifies "unfair competition," the very statutory charge the FTC is given to root out.