In reaction to the FCC's privacy regulation proposal, Free State Foundation President Randolph May issued this statement:
"First of all, the FCC's privacy proposal is another example of inefficient, bureaucratic government overreach at a time everyone knows that government resources are severely constrained. The FCC is proposing to duplicate what the Federal Trade Commission already is doing. Very few claim that the FTC is not doing a good job of protecting consumer privacy.
Second, and as importantly, the FCC's proposal is likely to cause real harm and confusion as a result of the disparate privacy regulations applied to Internet services providers ("ISPs") and Internet content providers like Google for reasons that won't make any sense to consumers.
Finally, this is just one more instance of the Obama Administration's FCC seemingly relishing the opportunity to impose, without any sound justification, harsher, costlier regulations on Internet service providers than on Internet content providers like Google. The FCC's imposition of a sweeping opt-in requirement for ISPs that doesn't apply to big Internet content providers distorts competition. And in the end, the likely result of this bureaucratic overreach is that the nation's consumers will be harmed by a reduction in relevant information that will be made available to them."
* * * Randolph J. May, President of the Free State Foundation, is a former FCC Associate General Counsel and a former Chairman of the American Bar Association's Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. Mr. May is a current public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and a Fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration. Mr. May is a nationally recognized expert in communications law, Internet law and policy, and administrative law and regulatory practice. He is the author of more than 180 scholarly articles and essays on communications law and policy, administrative law, and constitutional law. Most recently, Mr. May is the co-author, with FSF Senior Fellow Seth Cooper, of the recently released The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property and is the editor of the book, Communications Law and Policy in the Digital Age: The Next Five Years. He is the author of A Call for a Radical New Communications Policy: Proposals for Free Market Reform. And he is the editor of the book, New Directions in Communications Policy and co-editor of other two books on communications law and policy: Net Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Internet Services Be Regulated And Communications Deregulation and FCC Reform. The Free State Foundation is a non-profit, independent free market-oriented think tank.
The Free State Foundation
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