Posted by: Bob Quinn on January 13, 2010 at 11:09 am
Today, we sent a letter to the FCC in response to Free Press’ submission objecting to Senator Olympia Snowe’s sensible proposal for a way forward on the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Preserving the Open Internet. Rather than an overbroad blanket of Commission action, Snowe’s framework focuses on unjust or unreasonable discrimination that causes consumer harm or is anticompetitive.
The basic problem with Free Press’ approach is that it ignores the fundamental character of the Internet. Rather than helping consumers, it would instead deprive consumers of their ability to choose how to use Internet bandwidth and services. How is this pro-consumer?
This issue boils down to whether we want smart broadband networks that recognize the Internet as dynamic, innovative and ever-advancing, capable of enabling the latest gizmos the edge community can offer or whether we want dumb broadband networks that would only be capable of responding to the lowest common “quality” denominator, limiting the quality of those gizmos available to consumers.
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Posted by: Jim Cicconi on December 15, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Whatever one’s perspective, everyone involved in our industry knows how long the road to the FCC’s current proceeding on an open Internet has been. Today, I sent a letter to the FCC, which is similar to a filing I made last month. These letters, which build on the work and thoughts of others, outline a way forward – a middle ground that will accomplish the President’s, the Congress’, and the Commission’s goal of an open and universally available Internet.
Public policy often works best when it’s based on what has come before. In this area, we have a good starting point: the FCC’s existing Internet Policy Statement. The next building block on the way forward is a very thoughtful letter that Senator Olympia Snowe sent to the FCC on October 22. She focused on maintaining today’s “openness and freedom” for users while ensuring that government doesn’t inadvertently undermine the efforts to achieve affordable, ubiquitous broadband.
This same focus also lies at the heart of the statement titled “Finding Common Ground on an Open Internet,” jointly posted by Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon Wireless, and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, on October 21, 2009. Those companies, in our view, avoid embracing a strict nondiscrimination standard and instead focus on forms of discrimination that are unreasonable or anticompetitive.
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