Substance aside, Mr. Obama’s new order is a significant symbolic concession. The White House is admitting that after an historic voter rebuke due in part to its regulatory overkill, it must show some willingness to pull back the throttle. The President is gradually conceding the conservative and business critique of his first two years, even if the concessions so far are mostly in style and rhetoric.

This rules rethink is akin to the Democratic Congress’s vote to extend all the Bush-era tax rates while being forced to admit that raising them would hurt the recovery. Liberals have spent years dismissing warnings that their agenda created uncertainty and harmed the economy, and then they wake up to find their leader on the Wall Street Journal editorial page disowning “unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs.”

The real test will be how Mr. Obama defines “unreasonable.” The executive order he signed yesterday instructs federal agencies to weigh the costs and benefits of proposed rules and choose the least burdensome alternative. Yet that merely reiterates an executive order President Clinton signed in 1993 and that was supposed to be governing the Obama Administration all along. Mr. Obama also ordered a “retrospective analysis” of all rules to streamline or repeal the damaging ones.

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The Federal Communications Commission’s new “net neutrality” rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.

There’s little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn’t have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he’s had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.” (more…)

Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government’s reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling.

How did the FCC get here?

For years, proponents of so-called “net neutrality” have been calling for strong regulation of broadband “on-ramps” to the Internet, like those provided by your local cable or phone companies. Rules are needed, the argument goes, to ensure that the Internet remains open and free, and to discourage broadband providers from thwarting consumer demand. That sounds good if you say it fast.

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As a reminder of unpredictability in politics, consider what happened when the Progressive Change Campaign Committee last month announced that 95 candidates for Congress had signed a pledge to support “net neutrality.” The candidates promised: “In Congress, I’ll fight to protect Net Neutrality for the entire Internet—wired and wireless—and make sure big corporations aren’t allowed to take control of free speech online.”

Last week all 95 candidates lost. Opponents of net neutrality chortled, and the advocacy group retreated to the argument that regulation of the Internet wasn’t a big issue in the election. (more…)

In 1988, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Melbourne, Australia, to negotiate an international treaty for the future of telecommunications regulation. Since then, representatives from nations as diverse as Ghana, China and the U.S. have reunited and agreed that the Internet—that amazing global network of networks—was different from traditional phone service, and was best kept free from international phone regulation. That could change soon.

At least 191 countries are gearing up for the next round of talks at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the fall. The ITU is a treaty-based organization under the auspices of the United Nations that regulates international telecom services by, for instance, administering international telephone numbers. To date, the ITU has had no jurisdiction over the Internet. But the U.S.’s own telecom regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), may spark a possible cascade of international regulation of the Web, led by the ITU. The timing couldn’t be worse. (more…)