Haley Edwards

A Q&A with Aneesh Chopra, President Barack Obama’s former chief technology officer. Chopra says the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rules on net neutrality are in line with what the White House supported in 2010.

Chopra says that the critique from open Internet advocates misunderstands the problem. The point of the net neutrality rules is not to ban companies from purchasing access to faster, better service, he said; the point of the rules is to ensure that managed service agreements happen above board.

“In my personal opinion, the provision of managed services is not inconsistent with the principles of an open Internet, provided there is a robust level of oversight ensuring that we are not degrading the Internet service offerings for the rest of us,” he said. “You can’t just say, ‘Go forth and build managed services, good luck.’ You’ve got to have a robust review cycle to make sure that they are living up to standards.”

During the Q&A, Chopra touted the need for managed network services for telemedicine. However, he added that rules still need to be in place to the protect the consumer. Overall, he says he fully supports the President’s position on net neutrality and his vision of an open Internet.

One of the biggest Internet backbone companies in the world, Level 3, claimed that five of the major American consumer broadband providers have been abusing their near-monopoly access to American homes and offices to pad their profits, raise consumer costs and delay enhancements to the high speed lines.

The charge comes just as Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are considering a merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable that would make the new company the largest broadband provider in the country.

The big broadband providers “are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers,” writes Mark Taylor, Level 3′s VP of Content and Media, who argued that their near-monopoly in local markets was the main factor allowing them to get away with it. “They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content.”

In recent months, Taylor says that the big American commercial broadband providers have refused to share the cost of widening the important choke points that connect them to the global internetwork. Those so-called peering connections have become congested as more and more people use the Internet for things like streaming HD video.