The Net Neutrality Bait and Switch

[Commentary] The network neutrality issue is being thrown under the bus by the carriers and the GOP in favor of a much more important goal: getting rid of the existing Telecommunications Act entirely.

As long as there’s a sensible statute in place  --  which there is  --  Comcast and Verizon and AT&T run the risk of having their high speed Internet access services classified as “telecommunications services” under what President Barack Obama knowledgeably calls “Title II” of the Telecommunications Act. That’s a risk those companies are unwilling to run, because they would have to tell their investors that some of their future activities might be constrained. We have a perfectly good communications act. The President and the Federal Communications Commission are poised to use it. The carriers just don’t like it. And now they’re going to use the occasion of a President Obama veto and a hymn to bipartisanship to press as hard as they can to get an act they do like passed -- before there’s a risk of losing GOP control of Congress again. My prediction: Such an act will not require carriers to serve everyone in every community with world-class, reasonably priced Internet access. It will allow a flawed system to get even worse, all to make the rich carriers even richer.

[Susan Crawford is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law]