A Net Neutrality-Friendly FCC in Our Future?

Of all the Obama transition moves, this is about the best one for the netroots.

The Obama-Biden transition team on Friday named two long-time net neutrality advocates to head up its Federal Communications Commission Review team.

Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and Kevin Werbach, a former FCC staffer, organizer of the annual tech conference Supernova, and a Wharton professor, will lead the Obama-Biden transition team's review of the FCC.

Both are highly-regarded outside-the-Beltway experts in telecom policy, and they've both been pretty harsh critics of the Bush administration's telecom policies in the past year....

The choice of the duo strongly signals an entirely different approach to the incumbent-friendly telecom policymaking that's characterized most of the past eight-years at the FCC.

This March at a telecom policy conference in Hollywood, for example, Crawford bluntly told Ambassador Richard Russell, the White House' associate director on science and technology policy, that he lived in a fantasyland when he asserted that the United States' roll-out of broadband is going well....

And in a final introductory statement during her talk (that's likely to send shivers down the spines of telecom company executives) she said that she believes internet access is a "utility."

"This is like water, electricity, sewage systems: Something that each and all Americans need to succeed in the modern era. We're doing very badly, and we're in a dismal state," she said at the time.

Expansion of broadband across the country could--and should--be the Obama administration's version of rural electrification. It is just as critical to the nation's economic security and development as electrification was 70 years ago. And net neutrality is as critical to that development as any physical infrastructure. If the network gatekeepers--the telcos--are allowed to filter content and to charge arbitrarily for its delivery the Internet as we know it no longer exists.

The FCC is critical to the decision-making process on net neutrality now. Because the issue hasn't been legislated yet, they set the policy. So we're going to see the fight to preserve it continue at the regulatory level, and it's good news to think we'll have a friendlier FCC in the Obama administration. However, it's still going to be critical that Congress enact net neutrality protections, so prepare for that effort to kick up again in the new Congress. We should be on much friendlier ground with them, too.