The attention focused on the Justice Department recently has, quite rightly, centered on the firings of the U.S. Attorneys, the politicization and incompetence in the Department’s upper ranks and the general dismissal of civil rights.

We should add one other item to the performance review. Over the past few years, DoJ has become a shill for some of the most powerful industries in the country.

Yesterday (Sept. 6) was the latest example of DoJ’s role as spokesmodel for the telephone industry. Out of the blue long after the official comment period expired, it filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opposing the idea of Net Neutrality.

For most people, the telephone companies and cable companies excepted, the idea that the telephone and cable companies shouldn’t play favorites seems like a reasonable idea. After all, the Internet was created and flourished at a time when it was against the law for the companies offering the Internet access to discriminate among the services going over the wires.

But not at the Justice Department. Their filing could have been written in the executive offices of Verizon or AT&T. Instead of protecting the public interest and making sure that consumers have the benefits of competition, the DoJ defends a system that has seen our rankings in world Internet usage plummet.

Perhaps it’s just another example of the DoJ’s failure to recall salient facts, but the specious arguments just in this one document are quite frankly, embarrassing. To claim that “market forces” will protect consumers when the best consumers can expect is two choices for Internet access is ridiculous.

In the greater scheme of things, the filing is relatively small, but it was a sad, if representative commentary, of how DoJ views its role in issues of interest to my day job employer, Public Knowledge.

The Department’s biggest act of negligence came last year when it approved the $80 billion merger of AT&T and BellSouth with a two-paragraph press release. To be fair, the template for this quick-and-dirty response originated in the Clinton Administration. Then Acting Asst. Attorney General for Antitrust Joel Klein approved the very first merger, of Nynex and Bell Atlantic, not with a court document suggesting any conditions, but with a news release. That one deal put a single company in charge of telephone service from Maine to Virginia.

That decision could charitably be considered an anomaly considering the rest of the Clinton Administration’s overall record, and the fact that it was venturing into unknown territory.

The decision last year on AT&T’s takeover of BellSouth, the largest telecommunications merger in history, totally ignored the public interest. The DoJ left the heavy lifting to the FCC, which thankfully was able to impose some non-discrimination.

It would be bad enough if DoJ were only in the thrall of the telephone industry. But it’s not. For some reason, DoJ is acting as an arm of the entertainment industry in trying to carry out Draconian measures against consumers in the name of protecting copyrights.

DoJ created as Task Force on Intellectual Property that has consistently opposed the rights of consumers to make use of lawfully obtained music or video. The Task Force’s first chairman, David Israelite, has since gone on to head the National Music Publishers Association in the fight against consumer rights.

Most recently, DoJ floated intellectual property legislation that would include copyright violations in the category of offenses that could be investigated through wiretapping. That provision hasn’t much support, and in fact got some laughs.

It’s not funny, though, because DoJ has consistently gone to bat for the industry. In May, the Department sent to Capitol Hill a package of proposed intellectual property laws that included making attempted copyright infringement a criminal offense, increasing penalties for violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and setting a life sentence if a “counterfeiting offense” results in a harm to the public’s health and safety. DoJ proposal attempts to enforce copyright law in ways it has never before been enforced. They have proposed legislation making “attempted” copyright violations a crime, in line with much more serious offenses. Making the ‘attempt’ at copyright infringement the same as actual infringement is an ill-conceived concept.

The penalties in this bill are out of touch with reality. They range from destroying computers for potentially legitimate use, to life imprisonment for improbable uses of counterfeit goods. These penalties would be more appropriate for far more serious criminal offenses. Their policy line, in short, is the wish list from an industry that wants consumers to have to buy a new CD every time they want to put music on a new device and wants to stamp out legitimate consumer rights.

The Department of Justice has better ways to spend its time and resources than by pushing the interests of powerful industries. But perhaps the staff doesn’t recall or has forgotten the concept of the public interest.