Defending the Open Internet

Tim Wu, 41, a law professor at Columbia University, isn’t a direct participant in the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet/network neutrality rule making, but he is influencing it.

A dozen years ago, building on the work of more senior scholars, Wu developed a concept that is now a generally accepted norm. Called “net neutrality,” short for network neutrality, it is essentially this: The cable and telephone companies that control important parts of the plumbing of the Internet shouldn’t restrict how the rest of us use it. Most everyone embraces net neutrality, yet the debate over how to accomplish it is so volatile that more than a million signatures have been filed protesting FCC regulations that haven’t even been proposed yet. “Sometimes what everybody thinks about the law is more important than what the law itself says,” said Wu. “I think that’s what’s happened with net neutrality. It’s become a kind of norm of behavior, what you can and can’t appropriately do with the Internet. It’s got to be open. Except for legitimate purposes like protecting the network itself, there shouldn’t be discrimination against one form of content or another or one provider or another. And people generally accept that. Until now, the idea in a way has been more important than what the regulations have actually said.” But what the law says is important, even paramount, and Wu is one of the most influential voices arguing that net neutrality be fully protected by law and regulation, which, in his view, means treating the Internet like a regulated utility, for the good of all. That remedy may not happen immediately. But his opinion is nonetheless sought out by rule makers.