Next Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission is poised to establish Net Neutrality Internet regulations on a 3-2 partisan vote.  And since Chairman Julius Genachowski has refused to release a copy of the proposed rule until the day of, no one aside from the five voting commissioners knows exactly what it contains or how bad it will be.

One thing we do know is that Genachowski plans to include a requirement that Internet service providers (ISPs) are transparent about their network management policies – how ISPs organize data traffic to increase efficiency and reduce network congestion.  Yet, despite consistent and hollow rhetoric to the contrary, Genachowski has failed to be transparent about his own Internet regulatory policy.

Genachowski has claimed that giving the public greater access to information “is government the way it should be – open and transparent.”  Last year, when he began pushing for Net Neutrality Internet regulations, Genachowski stated flatly: “I will ensure that the rulemaking process will be fair, transparent, fact-based, and data-driven.”  Unfortunately, this last-ditch proposal is the opposite: partisan, non-transparent, and lacking proof of any market failure that would warrant government regulation.

On top of this, late last Friday – a mere 11 days before the FCC votes – the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau dropped roughly 1,900 pages of documents supporting their unreleased Internet regulation proposal into the docket.  Batched together in a series of ten non-searchable, unorganized PDFs are thousands of scanned excerpts from studies, websites, books, journals, and more.  While this serves as a last minute distraction for stakeholders trying to better surmise what regulations the FCC will be enacting, it's hardly enough time to digest all the documents.  Further, the data dump came just before the FCC's "sunshine period" started, which virtually prevents the public from following up with commissioners about the documents until after the proposal is voted on.

This action by the FCC is perhaps the first signal of how President Obama plans to hand victories to his far left base: regulations crafted by unaccountable and non-transparent government agencies behind closed doors.  We'll find out just how bad these regulations are when the Commission begins voting on them next week.