While we didn't get everything we wanted in the last Congress with Net Neutrality, we managed to hold off some very bad legislation, and to have a major impact in the negotiation process of AT&T's buyout of BellSouth, which was approved by the FCC today. While the larger buyout raises many valid concerns about media consolidation and conglomeration, the provisions on net neutrality agreed to by AT&T signal a significant win for the good guys. From Columbia law professor, Tim Wu:
The language in the agreement is written for a purpose: to preserve the most attractive features of the Internet as it now exists. Some perspective may be useful. In the 20th Century, at crucial points, technologies like radio and the recording industry moved from being lively and vital decentralized industries toward much more centralized control, often due to misguided government policy and industry consolidation. Stated simply, this agreement forms part of a general movement to prevent a similar fate for the Internet....
Strikingly, AT&T commits to a basic set of Network Neutrality principles that establish a baseline of great importance. They do not create a pure "bit-discrimination rule," but this language is crafted as a practical implementation of neutrality. As the first working rule, it may serve as a model and an experiment for what follows, which is why it merits attention.
This is a critical point: Key net neutrality opponents, including AT&T Chair Ed Whitacre, political sell-out Mike McCurry, and Sen. Ted "Tubes" Stevens have all pushed the talking point that net neutrality is such an amorphous, made-up, non-issue that it couldn't even be defined. The letter of commitment from AT&T to the FCC did a pretty good job of doing just that, defining net neutrality:
AT&T/BellSouth also commits that it will maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service. This commitment shall be satisfied by AT&T/BellSouth's agreement not to provide or to sell to Internet content, application, or service providers, including those affiliated with AT&T/BellSouth, any service that privileges, degrades or prioritizes any packet transmitted over AT&T/BellSouth's wireline broadband Internet access service based on its source, ownership or destination.
Stoller points out another important concession: with this agreement, AT&T acknowledges the public interesting in regulating telco networks, that "these networks are not AT&T's private property but are a regulated public communications vehicle that AT&T manages for profit." For once, the consumer won one with the telcos. Could this be the beginning of a reassertion of the public's supremacy in deteremining the use of a public good, the airwaves? Only if we keep up the pressure.
The agreement preserves net neutrality for 24 months or until federal legislation is enacted.