A column by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. offers some clues:

Ask the media bankers and investors at a recent FCC roundtable. To a man and woman, they said the FCC's stringent ownership rules have only cut broadcasters off from the capital to remake their businesses for the digital age.

Obviously the FCC goal is to put the spectrum in other hands instead of freeing broadcasters to develop cutting-edge services.

It is not just because the technology is new that it has made such a huge contribution to our economy; it's also because the new technology has been relatively unfettered by the government.

The whole subject of federal regulation re-emerges in a major way in coming weeks. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, Mark Landsbaum of the Orange County Register (in a column that I missed when it first came out) is among those trying to sound the alarm about losing freedom on the Internet.

Take note before they take it away.

The Georgia State Senate approved a sweeping reform of the state's telecommunications laws by a vote of 46 to 4 (see HB 168, as passed by the Senate).

The Senate bill

• Eliminates legacy telephone regulation that restricts competiton by creating artificial competitive advantages and disadvantages so that VoIP, wireless and wireline carriers will all have an equal opportunity to compete.
• Reduces inflated intrastate access charges for smaller rural telephone service providers and new entrants to the same level as interstate access charges.
• Sunsets Georgia’s Universal Access Fund, after providing a partial replacement of lost access revenues for ILECs who provide high-cost services (subject to a fully contested PSC hearing before allowing any fund distribution).

All providers of voice services should be subject to minimum regulation which does not discriminate on the basis of technology or history. This principle isn’t novel or unprecedented. In the Southeast region alone, the necessary reforms have been adopted in Alabama and other states are moving in the same direction.

George Gilder and I noted here that a 2007 study projected that Georgia consumers will save $3.3 billion over 5 years in the form of lower prices for voice services as a result of competition (which is at risk if regulation tilts the playing field).

Even more importantly, regulatory reform will reduce risk for investors who will have to finance universal access to the fastest broadband speeds, which the FCC staff estimates could cost $350 billion nationwide.

We cited another recent study which estimates that just a 7 percent increase in broadband adoption in Georgia would lead to the creation of 71,059 jobs and $3.9 billion in economic impact annually. Education, health care and financial services are sectors of the economy which are particularly well-positioned to benefit from increased investment in broadband.

The alternative to regulatory reform is to accept an unnecessary risk of diverting investment to another state with a lower risk profile.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president's friends at Google are hectoring China on Internet policy. Although commanding twice as many Internet users as we do, China originates fewer viruses and scams than does the U.S. and with Taiwan produces comparable amounts of Internet gear. As an authoritarian regime, it obviously will not be amenable to an open and anonymous net regime. Protecting information on the Internet is a responsibility of U.S. corporations and their security tools, not the State Department.

Historical data suggest that for every $1 billion in revenue, "core" network companies provided 2,329 jobs, while non-network "edge" companies provided 1,199 (about half as many). This indicates that Net Neutrality rules that reduce revenues and growth for network companies, and transfer benefits (revenue or growth prospects) to non-network companies, are a barrier to job creation.

PK is worried the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit might rule in a pending case that the FCC doesn't have jurisdiction to regulate broadband. The group also is fretting over a recent observation by AT&T that, "with each passing day, more and more communications service migrate to broadband and IP-based services," leaving the public switched telephone network ("PSTN") and plain old telephone service ("POTS") we all grew up with "as relics of a by-gone era."

Christine A. Varney, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust concurs, noting

It is premature to predict whether the wireless broadband firms will be able to discipline the behavior of the established wireline providers, but early developments are mildly encouraging.

The administration is clearly backtracking. But why?

Part of the reason is some unexpected political pressure, including a letter signed by 72 congressional Democrats opposing the FCC's proposed rules soon after they were announced.

But the bigger explanation is the growing priority within the administration for nationwide, affordable broadband service. In the course of preparing the national broadband plan, mandated by the 2009 stimulus bill, universal high-speed access has taken on increased significance in the government's hopes for a rapid economic recovery. Beyond the current financial woes, Congress, the FCC and the White House all recognize the importance of improving the communications infrastructure to maintain U.S. competitiveness in technology innovation.

In today's carrier networks, IP may not always be hyped or even seen, but it is indeed everywhere – and in 2010, it's only going deeper and making an even bigger impact.

But the message of all the brave talk about "ultimate outcomes that have yet to take hold today" is that once again it is becoming reasonable to predict that cable will win. CableTV is already frankly devoted to the transmission of the high definition interactive video that will comprise 99 percent of network traffic. This is the black hole into which all the plans for sophisticated Rich Communications Suites, guaranteed QoS, Internet Multimedia Services, and all the abortive plan for Long Term Evolution (LTE) will fall.

The companies for the new era will be the hardware enablers of broadband interactive video: graphics and network processors, optical transponders, wavelength division muxing gear, and optical circuit switches for the new TDM circuits that will be crucial for the robust streaming video that will be at the heart of the market.

That's the Henry Gau Telecosm and I'm sticking to it. Upgrading the old networks for video and multimedia, one service at a time, is a non-starter. It will be swept away by truly broadband wavelength circuits optimized for interactive video streams. Within these circuits all other
traffic can flow without significant additional expense.

Security, routing, session management, and switching all will be done on the customer edge and the datacenter, which will comprise the bulk of the server edge.

Unless the telco's grasp that their old circuit model is relevant again, they are going to give way to cable TV players who already get the picture in high definition and are moving ever closer to video teleconferencing.

According to the Times, this combination could be just awful

Comcast could bar rival cable and satellite TV companies from access to desirable NBC shows, or it could offer them only at a high price, bundled with less attractive content …. Comcast could now be tempted to limit access to NBC content on rival Internet services, or charge them high fees. And Comcast could take its bundling business model to the Internet by forcing customers to buy cable packages in order to see content from NBC’s network online.

These concerns might not justify blocking a merger. But they do justify a careful review …. What regulators must not do is let this deal pass unchallenged.

Well, if the deal is rejected or withdrawn, various special interests get nothing.

My interests were:

I could opt out of interest-based advertising or manage my ad preferences at the Google site, but, I figured, what's the point?

A Google representative told the New York Times that the Privacy Center pulls in tens of thousands of visitors each week. For every one person who opts out, four people change the categories they have fallen into, and 10 people do nothing, just look over the information on the site.

The same article quotes an academic who notes that some consumers do not understand behavioral advertising, and that “people are confused about which part of a Web page is advertising.” So apparently the argument is regulation is justified because it would relieve some people of the responsibility to get educated.

But one of the chief problems with any regulation -- no matter how well-intentioned -- is the difficulty containing it. For example, “a number of parties have suggested it would be appropriate to extend these privacy rights as a consumer protection to the offline side as well,” Rep. Boucher says.

The essays were the subject of a Capitol Hill event yesterday which featured remarks by Rep. Gene Green (D-TX) and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).

According to The Hill’s technology blog,

By glancing at the authors, it's no surprise that the 14-essay pamphlet's thesis is that net neutrality regulations would ultimately be harmful for consumers and thwart innovation. The table of contents has familiar names: Randolph May (Free State Foundation), Wayne Leighton (Empiris), John Mayo (Georgetown University) and Hance Haney (Discovery Institute), to name just a few. You most likely already know their positions.

“What we’re talking about here is not discrimination, but differential pricing,” added Hance Haney, director and senior fellow of the Technology & Democracy Project at the Discovery Institute. Banning such a practice will force providers to “recover the entire cost of investment from consumers,” he added.

Sound empirical research of treatments and outcomes requires the researcher to ignore the observed outcomes in formulating the hypothesis tests and choosing the empirical methodologies. Yet, the Berkman Study peeks at the outcome and then tries to formulate some procedure to attribute observed differences to one factor or another. In other words, throughout the Berkman Study, the authors are separating the sick rats from the well ones and then assigning the treatment ex post. This scheme is taboo among research scientists, since such outcomes-driven analyses are likely to render biased results, both in a statistical sense and by the introduction of researcher bias.

So far facts and data prove that "open access," aka network neutrality regulation, will impair broadband adoption, an inconvenient truth that civil rights groups have been citing.

The groups conversely contend that “Many feel that these [pro-net neutrality] organizations are pushing a regulatory perspective that would regressively shift the costs of bandwidth onto middle- and low-income consumers,” and in their letter describe the net neutrality advocates in question as “elite digital organizations” who “peddle” “destructive racial rhetoric.”