Strickling: Government Needs To Be Involved In Net Policy

National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) head Lawrence Strickling says the government should definitely be involved in sorting out the policy tensions -- like network neutrality -- between competing interests on the Internet in order to insure it remains an open and innovative platform that can be trusted by its users.

"I answer the question whether the government should be involved with an emphatic 'yes,'" he said, adding immediately that that role does not have to be as a heavy-handed regulator, saying the current regulatory regime is "too slow, backward looking and political," to be effective.

Strickling said that despite the currency of the "broadband ecosystem" metaphor, the Internet is not "a natural park or wilderness area that can be left to nature." He said he didn't believe that anyone in the Media Institute audience believed the government should leave the Internet alone. He said that hands off was the right policy when the Internet was first developed, but that this was a new century, with an Internet that had morphed into the "central nervous system" of the economy and society. He called the Internet a large and growing organization with "no natural self-regulatory equilibrium...The cacophony of human actors demands that there be rules or laws created to protect our interests," he said.