Yesterday Broadband for America released a study supporting continued regulatory hands off approach to the Internet. Here are some of the reports take-aways:

• Being unregulated has helped the Internet grow and expand in the face of “demand that is not just explosive in volume but unpredictable in type. Supply has unfailingly met demand, at ever-lower prices.”
• Regulated telecommunications services have been hurt by delay and rigidity. “The Internet’s responsiveness and adaptability stands in stark contrast to the rigidity created by the regulatory compensation regimes that have stifled conventional telephony. […] What makes the Internet so effective is not just its own simplicity and adaptability, but the absence of externally imposed rigidity.”
• Regulation will get in the way of innovation. “Any attempt to impose economic regulation on the Internet is likely to slow not only its own evolution but the innovation at the edge that depends on the Internet’s core.”
• “Were the Internet subjected to economic regulation, investors would expect slower growth and less responsiveness not only in the market for infrastructure, but in the edge markets for services, applications and devices that rely on it. Funding the Internet’s infrastructure would become more difficult.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote an opinion piece on the impact Wi-Fi access could have on the Cuban government. In her piece she interviews Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and gets his views on how the Internet can encourage discussion and hopefully dissension among Cuba’s inhabitants.

Social media helped to remove a regime in Egypt. It could, given the ability of people to organize via social media, do the same in Cuba.

Looking forward to the Facebook post that finally says, “No mas Castro y adios.”

The Wall Street Journal Online today published a piece about the Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers accept requests for new web domains. It seems that if I want to have a web domain ending as .altondrew or .centrism, I could apply for it, along with sending a $185,000 fee with each request.

I don’t see the benefit consumers of digital information will glean from expanding an Internet domain name or address. Branding, especially on the Internet, requires feeding the short attention span. If you want to increase broadband adoption, scaring consumers away with long domain names won’t cut it.

Jamilah King posted an in-depth article addressing how carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have created cyber-ghettos via their wireless service offerings. Unfortunately this admittedly in-depth article is a poorly veiled attempt to argue for net neutrality; a concept that has never considered how best to promote broadband adoption in minority communities much less increase economic activity. Net neutrality will only drive up the cost minorities pay for access to the Internet as higher compliance costs are passed through in the prices for mobile devices and wireless broadband access.

The article started off well, giving an ample description of the downside of access to the Internet via mobile versus fixed
wire connections. I was hoping that the article would focus on how the disproportionate reliance on handheld wireless
devices hinders our ability to produce content and create other ideas that could be sold for income, especially in a challenging economy such as ours. All I got was more whining about AT&T’s alleged bogey-man status.

It raises the question, however. Is the digital divide being compounded by the marketing of wireless devices toward blacks and Latinos thus giving the market the false sense that minorities are only interested in entertainment?

One of my favorite telecommunications industry analyst, Scott Cleland, hits it out the park with his piece on net neutrality. On the eve of the U.S. Senate debate on whether the Federal Communications Commission’s rules on net neutrality should be repealed, Mr. Cleland lays out a clear, cogent argument for why these rules are a farce and should be repealed. Click here for the article.

I would add that while the FCC will argue from now until hell freezes over that they are not regulating the Internet, from a consumer perspective, the Internet is broadband access, and as far as the consumer is concerned, when you start talking about transparency of carrier operations surrounding broadband, that is the Internet. The consumer does not distinguish between the two.

The courts made it clear in Comcast v. FCC not to come back with this back door way of trying to extend jurisdiction thus regulation over broadband. The Congress views broadband access as the Internet and has made clear its intent not to have broadband access treated like a telecommunications service.

All the FCC’s net neutrality rules have done is potentially slow down investment in the deployment of broadband facilities. All the FCC’s net neutrality rules have done is threaten broadband deployment to unserved urban, insular, and rural communities by making carriers think twice about facing unnecessary and onerous costs of compliance with rules invented to address a problem that doesn’t exist.

How these rules aided in promoting our economy is beyond me. How these rules aided in ensuring that minorities get access to a necessary resource in the knowledge economy is beyond me. It’s like the Occupy Wall Street types took over the FCC for a brief moment, and now the U.S. Senate is in a position to evict their butts out of the park.