Obama’s Plan to Regulate and Tax the Internet

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    Philosophically and politically, it is a strangely tone-deaf response to a landslide national election calling for smaller, less-intrusive government. But the most important impact for most people will be much more immediate: Obama’s plan includes a new 16.1 percent tax on your Internet bill, and would automatically rise every three months — all without the approval of the people’s elected representatives in Congress.

    Broadband Internet is the greatest infrastructure success story in America. While private investment has driven remarkable growth and innovation in the Internet, our water, sewer, power, and transportation infrastructure — largely run by government with tax dollars — are, to put it kindly, not doing nearly as well. Who, besides our president, looks at the state of infrastructure in America and says Internet is the problem area?

    Beyond that obvious fact, there is this even more concrete problem in Obama’s plan: it will replace private investment with taxes that will hit every American hard in the pocketbook.

    Former FCC commissioner Harold Furchgott-Roth explained: “By classifying broadband access services as ‘interstate telecommunications services,’ those services would suddenly become required to pay FCC fees. At the current 16.1 percent fee structure, it would be perhaps the largest, one-time tax increase on the Internet.”

    It will only get worse from there, because the tax will go up every three months —without a vote of Congress — and there is reason to believe that private investment would rapidly collapse, forcing the new tax higher and higher just to keep the Internet working. (And forget about it actually continuing to get better.)

    On Wall Street, Obama’s plan is known as the nuclear option because of the devastating effect it would have on private investment. In fact, simply the announcement of Obama’s plan has caused AT&T to stall billions of dollars of investment in deploying expensive fiber-optics networks on about 100 cities.

    Has anyone stopped to ask what exactly the problem is that we’re trying to solve?

    Even Bill Clinton’s favorite think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, railed against the Obama plan, warning that it is “inconsistent with the Democratic Party’s legacy. After all, the Internet took off in the 1990s, thanks in significant degree to the ‘light touch’ approach to regulation adopted by the Clinton-Gore Administration.”

    When was the last time anybody said: “The Internet has really gone downhill since it was opened up to private commercial development”?

    Who looks at bad old days of monopoly public utility regulation of Ma Bell and says: “The Internet would be so much better if it worked liked the old phone system”?

    The whole push for the Obama plan comes from two constituencies: rent-seeking video giants like Google/YouTube and NetFlix who think a taxpayer-funded, government-regulated utility will guarantee them zero-cost access to customers, and ideological extremists like Free Press, whose founder Robert McChesney once famously explained: “the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

    For pretty much everybody who isn’t a giant content company or a hardcore liberal extremist, regulating and taxing the Internet is obviously a terrible idea and Congress should therefore step in and stop the FCC from implementing Obama’s plan.

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    © Copyright 2014 Phil Kerpen, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

    Mr. Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at phil@americancommitment.org.

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    15 COMMENTS

    1. There nothing surprising about this President and if the Democrat leadership idly stands by allowing this to occur the effects will be felt come 2016. Recalling the elections of 2008, wasn’t it the the young people that came out for “Change” voting and isn’t it the young people that uses the hell of the internet? You better know your Senators phone number by heart…and I remembered when Clinton was in office and how he was so hated. Never thought there would be the day when many of us wishes he was still in office (Hillary excluded of course)

    3. Landslide election? are you kidding me. Only 30% of the voters even bothered to go vote. Duh. No one can call that a land slide anything. More like a political fluke. And I’ve not heard nor read anything anywhere else about the so called Obama’s plan for the internet. I really doubt the truth of this article at this point in time. I stopped reading after the first paragraph as it was filled with right wing ideology and statements that were just pure propaganda for the GOP.

      • There is one issue that I’ve read about lately. It has to do with charging more for faster or more thorough internet service. That’s so that the rich people have better and more reliable internet service at the risk of everyone else getting shut down or throttled down. I’m all for making the internet net neutral. And I have a sneaky suspicion that this article is a sneak attack on net neutrality.

        • You’re right the stupidity based article is, “Straight BS……….. No Chaser”. Just like the crap the local mainstream media feeds you all a daily diet of with your machines back door politics.. You wanna be the BD’er, or the BD’e ? The take home has its similarities.

          http://www.whitehouse.gov/net-neutrality

    4. This is all another commie conspiracy. That f’n Obama.

      I am flat-out happy with Time-Warner, AT&T and Cox Cable controlling internet fees and deciding whether I get access to the cable/internet lines regardless of where I live. The cable and internet companies have always made sure I had easy, inexpensive access, and I believe them when they say I will always have free and unfettered access to Netflix, Amazon-Prime and other internet video sites. And they have never started charging me for different download rates neither! My internet and cable bill ain’t never gone up since I got it in 1996. It is the same every year. I ain’t got no worries about having a gas line to my house, a water line to my house and an internet line to my house. They love me and never increase the rate while cutting my download speed and access.

      And I ain’t got one single worry that the author of this article is AT&T, Time-Warner and Cox Cable. This is all about that f’n Obama.

    5. ….it’s clear JoeBiden and Danceswithwolves ain’t no ignorant sheep either! They know this is about Obama and is Obama’s fault. They are not fools, that AT&T, Cox Cable and Time-Warner cable companies are in no way goading them to believe this internet bust-up is about that Tea Party hatin’ commie Obama.

      They know Obama wants to take away their guns! Stop that Obama from taxing the internet or that commie bastard is gonna take away your guns!

    6. if you like your internet you can keep your internet………..hell the ignorant liberal gruber goobers will save 2500 bucks a year on their cable and internet bill…………….…just trust commie barry…………….

    8. The President’s only remaining recourse these days is to poke a stick in the eye of every opposing front that rejects his dick tator ship of state. That and milk the populus of every cent possible. A pitiful example of mankind. !

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