Wednesday, August 06, 2008

The FCC's Misleading Disclosure Statement

The FCC's website contains the following statement: "The FCC does not regulate the Internet or Internet Service Providers (ISP)." Check it out for yourself here.

While the import of this statement has been "degraded" and "impaired" in various ways over the last couple of years, the FCC's action last week sanctioning Comcast in the BitTorrent affair certainly now renders the statement, to put it nicely, inoperative. Or you could say inaccurate or false. You could find other similar declarations, but this one in the Commission's news release indicates the extent to which the agency's website statement is inaccurate: "The Commission announced its intention to exercise its authority to oversee federal Internet policy in adjudicating this and other disputes regarding discriminatory network management practices with dispatch..."

In the interest of accurate disclosure, I assume the FCC fairly promptly will correct the website statement. Perhaps in the interest of the fullest possible disclosure it will even provide a link to the Comcast order.