Election Results May Move Net Neutrality to Front Burner
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Barack Obama’s victory opens the door to federal net neutrality rules, including on wireless, Google and Free Press executives said last week on a panel at the Wireless Communications Association Symposium. Debate had died down in recent months as the sides gained an appreciation of each other’s interests, AT&T and Google executives said.
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Obama promised Silicon Valley “he would take a back seat to no one on net neutrality,” said Policy Director Ben Scott of Free Press. Neutrality will be protected by regulation or legislation that doesn’t require “300 pages of a Chinese menu of which practices are open and which are not,” he predicted. All that’s needed is adding a nondiscrimination rule to the FCC’s four Internet principles, Scott said. A neutrality rule was imposed on AT&T as a condition of its taking over BellSouth, and “I don’t believe the sky has fallen,” he said. Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel, agreed that a federal nondiscrimination rule is coming.
But Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs, said the incoming administration’s “overriding objective” will be broadband deployment and the investment to pay for it, not net neutrality. That tilt has already been seen in broadband bills in Congress, said Christopher Guttman- McCabe, CTIA’s vice president of regulatory affairs.
The government should take into account differences among technologies, specifically between wired and wireless telecom, by acting against discrimination case by case, Guttman-McCabe said. “There’s a constant evolution and exceptions to any rule you'd put in place,” he said.
Whitt agreed with Cicconi that in recent months net- neutrality fights have been cooling. They said high-tech and consumer interests have recognized the legitimacy of service providers’ concerns about network management and the providers have acknowledged opposition to discriminatory behavior. “AT&T shares the objective of an open Internet,” Whitt said. “We didn’t always feel that was the case.” The FCC has held off on dealing with wireless net neutrality to watch developments, and “overall, the market response has been quite positive,” he said.
Comcast asked for and got a meeting with Vint Cerf, the Internet pioneer and Google’s chief Internet evangelist, around the time the FCC upheld a complaint against the cable company for interfering with peer-to- peer traffic using BitTorrent, Whitt said. As reflected in Comcast’s later compliance report to the commission, the company adopted some of Cerf’s suggestions and may yet adopt others, Whitt said. “I don’t know that we can take credit” for the way Comcast is pursuing “a more application and protocol agnostic approach” to network management, he told us after the panel.
FCC action on Skype’s request to impose Carterfone nondiscrimination rules on cellular networks has been “in a sort of limbo” since Chairman Kevin Martin announced he had circulated a proposed order to his colleagues, Scott said. But “merely having it out there” gives the FCC leverage over service providers’ behavior, by allowing the commission to act if it finds that necessary, Whitt said.