Helluva 100th Birthday Present
Today a divided FCC voted out a rule on net neutrality. I consider it somewhat ironic that the agency did this a week and a day before Ronald Coase’s 100th birthday. Coase, of course, being the great scholar who 51 years ago who showed decisively that the entire rationale for FCC regulation of airwaves was fundamentally flawed.
Given that Coase is–amazingly–still an active scholar*, it would be gratifying and edifying if he would weigh in on how the FCC, and Washington generally, hasn’t learned much since 1959.
* Coase has a new book on China’s development as an emerging capitalist economy that will be released in May, 2011.