It’s amazing to me that at this point we’re still pretending there’s a phone monopoly. Competition exists. Yes, it’s obvious that nobody has a monopoly on phone service anymore. The assumption that there’s a monopoly is detached from the reality of the modern market. People routinely go without landlines these days, and there’s even competition for those!

FCC is at least pretending to investigate the need to deregulate and prepare for the IP Revolution in phone service. We’ll see if they rig it to get what they want out of it, though. No, I’m not very optimistic about second term Obama regulators.

FTC is making another move in privacy, updating COPPA-driven regulation of privacy… for the children. Let me just state at first that if your kids are going online on their own, then that’s on you, parents. Do your jobs and quit looking for nanny state to do it for you. Seriously. Especially since the regulations coming out are out of step with how society is actually treating privacy.

You can’t legislate privacy in a society that doesn’t act like it cares about privacy. Oh sure, society talks big. People forward around the latest Facebook or Google outrage. But they keep using the same services because getting solid services for free is what they actually care about.

It’s pretty bad though that the Obama administration is “disappointed” about the ITU treaty, acting like they’re helpless on the international stage. Maybe they are. Maybe Obama and his team are just incapable of representing American values and interests abroad.

Google doesn’t have a search monopoly, thanks in no small part to the open nature of the Internet, and to the power of domain-specific search. But it is interesting that the activist Obama regulators <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/ftc-under-fire-for-passing-on-googles-search-practices-critics-say/2012/12/18/aec0d708-487f-11e2-b6f0-e851e741d196_print.html"<chose not to act against Google.

If you think government cybersecurity regulators can keep up with the black hats then you’re fooling yourself.