The Heartland Institute

Yes, Leftists are talking about taxing emails. Again. Ponder for but a moment the monumental government overreach necessary to monitor and count every email every American sends. Network Neutrality and President Barack Obama’s Cyber Security Executive Order are hay-yuge government Web data grabs. They pale in comparison to this ...

Via a video by Mike Wendy of MediaFreedom.org , Less Government's Seton Motley — a policy advisor for The Heartland Institute on telecom and technology issues and frequent guest on the tech episodes of the Heartland Daily Podcast — talks about what President Obama's next pick for chairman of the Federal Communications Commission ...

It’s the New Year, the pre-dawn of President Barack Obama’s second term – in which he is free to be more “ flexible ,” and is resolved to engage in even more illegal, unilateral power grabs. Long on the Obama-Leftist power grab hit list has been the Internet. Pre-Obama, the ‘Net was just about regulation-free – and thus ...

In the Fiscal Cliff negotiations, we have heard ad nauseum from the Left about making “The Rich” – the 1% ( oops, they now mean 2% ) – “pay their fair share” of federal income taxes. When it comes to the nation’s Internet bandwidth-using 1%, however, many on the Left are demanding the 99% pay for the vast majority of the ...

Some very creative and determined pessimists at the FCC have managed to turn a thrilling victory into an agonizing defeat. As of June, 2011, 95% of all Americans had access to broadband Internet from cable, DSL, fiber or other wired services. That’s up from 15% as recently as 2003, and zero percent in 1996, when high-speed ...

A group of free-market think tanks Monday filed a brief in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the Federal Communication Commission's 2011 "Preserving the Open Internet" Order. The group's amici curiae brief says the FCC's rule denies Internet service providers their constitutional rights and forces consumers to "bear ...

The Federal Communications Commission ruled in Bloomberg TV's favor in a dispute with Comcast, saying the cable provider must provide the business news network with more desirable channel positions. The decision was issued by the FCC's media bureau. Comcast announced it would appeal the FCC’s May decision to the full commission ...

Partly in response to the Federal Communications Commission’s handling of the Comcast-NBCU merger, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved two pieces of legislation that would prevent regulatory overreach by requiring any conditions imposed on transactions to be within the commission’s existing authority and be tailored ...

In 2002 and 2003, celebrities uttered obscenities during live television broadcasts. The offensive words led to a battle over the Federal Communication Commission’s indecency standards, ultimately argued Jan. 10 in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the nearly 10 years it took for the case to reach the highest court, free ...

In response to complaints in Oklahoma and other states from both telephone customers and service providers regarding problems with completion of telephone calls, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission has requested the Federal Communications Commission address the so-called “call termination” problems. The OCC joined public officials ...

On June 21, 2011, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) filed a petition of regulatory forbearance with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding Section 652 of the Communications Act. The petition requests the FCC not block mergers between competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and cable companies ...

Marc Oestreich , The Heartland Institute’s legislative specialist for technology policy, discusses the October 27 reform of the $8 billion Universal Service Fund by the Federal Communications Commission. ...

ITTN PODCAST - Marc Oestreich, legislative analyst for The Heartland Institute, speaks with Infotech & Telecom News Managing Editor Bruce Edward Walker regarding the Federal Communications Commission’s fundamentally flawed e-Rate program. ...

ITTN PODCAST - Bret Swanson reviews his recent Forbes column on the Federal Communications Commission’s misperceptions regarding the status of broadband wireless in the United States. ...

U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division Chief Christine Varney declared in 2009 that "the vast majority of mergers are either procompetitive and enhance consumer welfare or are competitively benign."1 But if so, why impose unnecessary regulatory barriers to achieving procompetitive, proconsumer telecom mergers? Consider the case ...

From the Korea Information Society Development Network: Communications & Convergence Review Network neutrality has been at the center of US telecommunications policy for several years, culminating in a recent FCC order imposing a limited form of net neutrality on US broadband Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The regulatory imposition ...

Abstract: Last year’s Annual Report and Analysis of Competitive Market Conditions with Respect to Mobile Wireless broke new ground by not concluding, as had prior reports, that the wireless services market was “effectively competitive.” This year’s report did the same. The 14th and 15th reports review a wide variety of evidence ...

The problems created by the Commission's failure to clarify Section 652's reach have become particularly acute. Many CLECs are struggling to raise capital. CLEC-cable combinations provide a unique opportunity to mount an effective challenge to incumbent LECs, which maintain a dominant position in serving business customers, the ...

In this week's podcast, Bartlett Cleland, Director of the Center for Technology Freedom, Institute for Policy Innovation, speaks with Bruce Edward Walker, managing editor of InfoTech & Telecom News, regarding the FCC's approval of the NBC Universal/Comcast merger. ...

Seton Motley speaks with Bruce Edward Walker, managing editor of InfoTech & Telecom News, regarding, among other topics, the network neutrality agenda for the December 21 Federal Communications Commission meeting. ...