The decades-old idea that could break the net neutrality logjam

Ever since the DC Circuit court ruled that the government can't ban Internet providers from blocking or prioritizing Web traffic, the Federal Communications Commission has been looking for a way to get around the ruling.

For network neutrality advocates, the few proposals that have emerged so far aren't satisfying; they're all a little risky, and they aren't guaranteed to produce the results that the FCC wants. Now a new recommendation has federal regulators sitting up. Under the proposal, regulators would surgically apply new rules on Internet providers that otherwise could only be imposed on phone companies. And with that, the FCC could solve some of the thorniest issues surrounding net neutrality, according to a paper co-written by Columbia Law scholars Tim Wu (who coined the term "net neutrality") and Tejas Narechania.

They argue that the FCC should selectively be able to apply more stringent, telecommunications-type regulations to certain aspects of an industry that tends to escape easy definition. From Wu and Narechania's perspective, this describes exactly what phone companies do: Establish the connection between a caller and a responder for the purposes of a transaction. And this telecommunications function is increasingly what we pay Internet providers to do -- unlike before, when they offered telecommunications as one of a bundle of features that together added up to an "information service."

Under these conditions, the authors say, the FCC would be completely justified in applying Title II of the Communications Act -- the part of the FCC's congressional charter that lets it apply blanket restrictions on phone companies -- to broadband companies, which are currently regulated lightly as Title I businesses.