Once the election smoke has cleared, Congress appears poised to pass Network Neutrality legislation. With promises from the Obama campaign about upholding neutrality principles, any remaining FCC opposition will be left standing out on a weak limb.
If you hadn’t noticed that the Congress did virtually nothing these past two years, well, that’s because they were likely laying low while campaign money was still hot (certain major corporations are both anti-neutrality and big donors) and while it was still conceivable to shift blame to an already failing administration. If anything at all was accomplished it was while we were distracted by other things—FISA with telco immunity late enough in campaign season the people were discussing Obama and Clinton, but early enough to secure more money in advance of the big dance, and harsh new copyright infringement legislation while John McCain and Barney Frank were staging histrionic economic crisis distractions.
Laying low definitely paid off, but now Congressional Democrats have some more backup to actually get some things accomplished—one of those things, thanks to less Republican objection, will be Net Neutrality in 2009. No doubt neutral-net champions Ed Markey and Byron Dorgan will be dusting off legislation lying dormant since 2007.
President-elect Obama, if true to his word, will sign it into law soon after he’s appointed a new head of the FCC. The ComputerWorld:
"There's a lot of people who now believe that companies like AT&T are not plotting to overthrow the open Internet concept," Cicconi said.
“It's against AT&T's economic interest to block or slow Internet content, because customers demand an open Internet, he added. "Our core asset is our network," he said. "We get paid for carrying bits."
Mind-blowing because there has been no larger, stauncher opponent of Net Neutrality, unless Cicconi hasn’t heard his bosses speak about it. Before the merger both CEOs of BellSouth and AT&T expressly stated their opposition and their desire to discriminate between content providers and the company, alongside Verizon, actively lobbied against any such openness while declaring falling skies, dying hospital patients, and crashing economies.
Well, economies crashed alright, but it wasn’t because of Net Neutrality regulation. Rather it seems no regulation at all caused the economies current woes, doesn’t it?
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