Intellectual Property Law

Letter to the FCC

By Susan Crawford

Here’s a letter I sent to the FCC at the end of last week, with Marvin Ammori and Tim Wu.

Avoiding the power of natural monopoly gatekeepers over basic inputs should be a bipartisan goal of government.  Progressivism isn’t a conservative or liberal direction to follow.

Many people who began as conservatives in the 1890s became Progressives because they were upset by the economic and political abuses of the great corporations in the 1880s and 90s.

New Jersey became the bargain-counter home of the largest holding companies in the nation, handing out corporate charters with abandon. Citizens of New Jersey were particularly irritated by the trust companies that controlled gas, electric, and trolley services in the northern part of the state - natural monopoly services with high costs of entry.  These companies enjoyed very close relations with the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties of the day.

And so Progressivism was born, in New Jersey and elsewhere in the country.  The unorganized - the free marketeers, many of them traditional conservatives - were unhappy with the consequences of over-organization at the company level by these natural monopolies.

The free market can’t operate effectively if basic inputs aren’t available in a non-discriminatory fashion.  So although the FCC is considering what to do with the Title I/Title II issue, the larger issue is a basic one.  As with the railroads in the last century:

We are having a bitter controversy over transportation policy. We shall have to choose, apparently, between a ‘free’ transportation system, in which competition prevails, and a ‘planned’ system, such as the carriers prefer - provided, of course, they are permitted to do most of the planning.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on May 03, 2010 (boomark / email).