In the News

The New York Times called it “courtship of the business community.” While Michael Livermore, Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU, a think tank that supports strong health and environmental regulations, applauds the move.

The return of Republican control in the House of Representatives and a new, business-friendly governor in Albany will likely put the spotlight in the months ahead on the dreaded R-word: regulation. If we keep cool, avoid name-calling and look at government regulation as something to be calibrated, not killed, this confluence of events can lead to greater efficiency instead of random slashing.

This food price news comes on the heels of new data on the cost of oil, which closed at more than $90 a barrel earlier this week. “The last time we had a spike in food prices, it was related to increased oil prices, and that’s because oil is an input into food for the production price,” said Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Or, some people argue, EPA could have done what most economists agree is the sensible thing and established a cap-and-trade program on its own. Think tanky groups like the Constitutional Accountability Center and the Institute for Policy Integrity argued that the Clean Air Act gives EPA that power. Of course, that would have been politically explosive too.

When human health and safety are at risk Americans expect their government to protect them. We assume we are guarded against risks like lead in children’s toys or poisons in our drinking water. And for the most part, these protections deliver benefits well beyond what they cost. A proposal on Capitol Hill would require Congress to vote on every large regulation put forward. The measure (PDF), given the acronym “REINS,” and introduced by Jim DeMint in the Senate and Geoff Davis in the House, has as its goal slowing down what they call “costly anti-free market regulations that are destroying jobs.” But its real effect will be to grind action by administrative agencies nearly to a halt.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in April that the FCC did not have legal authority to stop Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, from blocking its customers’ access to a file-sharing service called BitTorrent. The decision limited the FCC’s power over web traffic under the current law and gave the ability for Internet service companies to block or slow specific sites. For example, they could decide to charge video sites like YouTube to deliver their content faster to users. “That’s the worst case scenario,” said Scott Holladay, an economics fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University. “The likelihood of that happening is very small.”

Look for a court case to drag out for months and possibly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, said Michael Livermore , executive director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. “This decision is on shaky legal ground so it is completely possible it would not be upheld,” he said. “But this is going to be the deal for at least 18 months to a couple years — a court challenge would take a while. As a result, for broadband, this compromise could just end up kicking the can down the road since there’s a good chance it gets overturned and we’ll have the larger net neutrality fight again in two years.”

To his credit, DeMint may have a point buried underneath all that silly rhetoric, and it has to down with how the FCC enacted Net Neutrality in the first place. The New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity bemoaned [PDF] the fact that the FCC passed Net Neutrality not by “[invoking] it more robust regulating powers,” but that it “based the new rule on legal authority that was called into serious doubt by court decision earlier this year making the long term prospects for the rule quite poor.”

Michael Livermore talks to the hosts of KGO’s Noon News about the FCC’s decision on net neutrality

It’s now official. At 1:05 pm Eastern Time today the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to enact a controversial set of proposed rules on network neutrality, effectively getting the government into the business of regulating the Internet in ways it hasn’t done before. Congressional Republicans are already planning on holding hearings next year.