FTC Ready to Kill Net Neutrality? (T, VZ, CMCSA, TWC)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 28, 8:07AM EDT

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Stock Tickers: T, VZ, CMCSA, TWC

Last night it was a little surprising to see the FTC saying that there was no need for regulation of net neutrality. The FTC’s Deborah Platt Majoras apparently said that there was no evidence of market failure in this area and that a combination of antitrust laws and the ability for customers to complain if they feel access speeds are impeded should be enough to protect net neutrality.

What the FTC is not addressing is that these companies have been on good behavior because they have had to be on good behavior. They are ignoring that this gives the power to the copper and fiber owners to slow down traffic that either isn’t their own customer traffic or traffic that is deemed as being too bulky in bandwidth.

It is always amazing when an agency just assumes that big companies will do the right thing just because there hasn’t been evidence of any wrongdoing. The quote from the CNN article is almost baffling: "To date we are unaware of any significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm from conduct by broadband providers," said Majoras. "Policy makers should be wary of enacting regulation solely to prevent prospective harm to consumer welfare, particularly given indeterminate effects on such welfare of potential conduct by broadband providers."

Hopefully this is an FCC issue more than an FTC issue. But if they are not worried about this at all, then why on earth are they even remotely concerned about a satellite radio merger that is not over critical infrastructure? This would end up being a huge win for AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) if the FTC gets its way.

Trust me when I tell you that, regardless of your political beliefs, this would mark a potentially giant blow to Joe Q. Consumer in favor of a few giant companies that own most of the copper and fiber that makes up the Internet.

Jon C. Ogg
June 28, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.