Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr is calling the Biden administration’s “digital equity” plan for all internet services and infrastructure an “unlawful power grab.”
“President Biden’s plan hands the Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the country. Never before, in the roughly 40-year history of the public Internet, has the FCC (or any federal agency for that matter) claimed this degree of control over it.
Indeed, President Biden’s plan calls for the FCC to apply a far-reaching set of government controls that the agency has not applied to any technology in the modern era, including Title II common carriers,” Carr said in a statement on Monday.
Carr previewed an important FCC vote next week on Nov. 15 about whether to implement the president’s plan. “Congress never contemplated the sweeping regulatory regime that President Biden asked the FCC to adopt—let alone authorized the agency to implement it,” he said.
Carr explained that the Biden administration’s “broadband policies are failing” and the “costs of building Internet infrastructure in this country have skyrocketed” due to his economic policies.
While the FCC has been looking to expand “new, 5G services,” it has “needlessly blocked and delayed new broadband infrastructure builds” because of “regulatory red tape.”
The commissioner said President Joe Biden has chosen to blame “the private sector and free market capitalism itself for the Administration’s own policy shortfalls” and is pushing the FCC to adopt “a one-page section of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Infrastructure Act),” which has “new rules of breathtaking scope, all in the name of ‘digital equity.’”
“For the first time ever, those rules would give the federal government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions—from how [internet service providers] allocate capital and where they build, to the services that consumers can purchase; from the profits that ISPs can realize and how they market and advertise services, to the discounts and promotions that consumers can receive. Talk about central planning,” Carr warned.
If passed, the FCC would be empowered, for the first time, to regulate every ISP’s service termination terms, use of customer credit, account history, credit checks, and account termination, among many other items.
“There is no path to complying with this standardless regime. It reads like a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university’s Soviet Studies Department,” Carr said.
He added, “The Biden Administration’s plan empowers the FCC to regulate every aspect of the Internet sector for the first time ever. The plan is motivated by an ideology of government control that is not compatible with the fundamental precepts of free market capitalism.”