Is the FCC Reading from the MMS Playbook?

If you haven’t already, take a few minutes to read this piece that ran today in the Washington Post. Really, do it. I’ll wait. This is me waiting.

“How the Minerals Management Service’s partnership with industry led to failure” is a play-by-play of how lax government regulation and industry-written rules led to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and brought a U.S. government agency to its knees. It eerily foreshadows where the Federal Communications Commission could be headed if Chairman Julius Genachowski doesn’t stand up to the industry he is in charge of overseeing.

The Chairman has been reluctant to reassert the FCC’s authority by reclassifying broadband Internet access and enacting real Net Neutrality protections. Meanwhile, the telecommunications industry has stepped up to the plate, echoing efforts by MMS in the ’90s, which spent time working with industry to develop policies that suited all parties. MMS, as a result was “not capable of navigating its dual relationship as regulator and industry partner.”

Google and Verizon partnered to establish a legislative framework that undermines openness on both the wired and wireless Internet – leaving the latter completely unprotected. And now AT&T, Microsoft and others reportedly are busily crafting their own proposal for a “legislative remedy.”

“We can handle this,” these companies are telegraphing Chairman Genachowski. And he seems all too happy to sit idly by, watch the game unfold, and hope he doesn’t get called in off the bench.

It’s this very attitude that resulted in the spill (spill seems like such an unimpressive word for what happened) in the Gulf. “As it had dozens of times before, the agency (MMS) adopted language provided by the industry’s trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, and incorporated it into the Federal Register,” according to the Post. Wait a few weeks, change a few words, and that sentence could very well speak for the FCC and the future of the Internet.

The story of how MMS ended up where it is today sounds all too familiar to FCC-watchers. “After the Clinton administration set the table for the [industry-agency] partnership, the George W. Bush administration let the industry run it.”

Over the past decade, former FCC Chairmen Michael Powell and Kevin Martin handed oversight of communications to a few large corporations – most notably by changing the way broadband was treated under the Communications Act and by setting in motion the current crisis that could leave the FCC without the ability to protect Internet users and at the mercy of a few big companies.

Chairman Genachowski should not leave the rule-writing to those expected to follow the rules. Because history shows over and over again, we can’t trust them.

While the oil and energy industries sucked the life out of MMS amid frequent warning signs, the agency remained publicly committed to its partnership. Some partnership. We can see what happens when you leave it up to the oil industry to regulate its own drilling practices. It’s the same thing that happened on Wall Street when the public’s watchdogs were defanged. Are we going to look back five, 10, 15 years from now at a closed Internet and say, “well turns out big phone and big cable couldn’t regulate themselves either”?

The answer should be no. And the solution is simple: Chairman Genachowski and the FCC must take the lessons learned from disasters of other oversight agencies and chart a different course. That means standing up to the big industries and using the votes they have to restore the agency’s authority and safeguard Net Neutrality.

That’s the FCC’s job. And it’s the RIGHT thing to do.

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