My initial reaction to President Obama’s call, on Monday, for the Federal Communications Commission to categorize Internet service providers (I.S.P.s) as public utilities, akin to suppliers of power and water, was that it can’t be all bad. Maybe I’m biased, but any proposal that is immediately criticized in the strongest terms by Ted Cruz, the junior Republican senator from Texas, and by Michael Powell, Colin’s son and the F.C.C.’s chairman from 2001 to 2005, who now serves as the top lobbyist for the cable-television industry, is very likely to have something going for it.
And so it has.
In
a post on this site, Tim Wu, the Columbia University law professor who came up with the phrase “net neutrality,” noted that President Obama came into office pledging to appoint an F.C.C. chairman who supported strict rules preventing I.S.P.s from blocking certain Web sites, or from creating slow lanes and fast lanes so that some sites load faster than others. Six years, two F.C.C. chairmen, and several hostile court rulings later, we are still no nearer to seeing such policies enacted. Indeed, we are a good deal further away from them. Big content companies like Netflix are busy cutting deals, or preparing to cut deals, with big I.S.P.s—the likes of Comcast, A.T. & T., and Verizon—to insure that their data gets preferential delivery.
