Father of net neutrality, Tim Wu, pins hope on ‘the judiciary to stop this latest travesty’ – By Daniel Chaitin (washingtonexaminer.com) / Nov 22 2017
The man who coined the term “net neutrality,” Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, believes the Obama-era Internet regulations that the Trump administration is poised to strike down can be saved by the legal system.
“In our times, the judiciary has increasingly become a majoritarian force,” Wu wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. “It alone, it seems, can prevent narrow, self-interested factions from getting the government to serve unseemly and even shameful ends. And so it falls to the judiciary to stop this latest travesty.”
The problem facing the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission, which will vote on net neutrality next month, is whether it can properly justify the drastic swerve in federal policy, according to Wu.
“As the Supreme Court has said, a federal agency must ‘examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action,'” Wu wrote. “Given that net neutrality rules have been a huge success by most measures, the justification for killing them would have to be very strong.”
He added: “It isn’t. In fact, it’s very weak.”
The net neutrality regulations prevent Internet service providers like Verizon and AT&T from charging more for certain services, like Netflix for example, and blocks them from slowing down or speeding up content, which consumer advocates warn could be used by these ISPs to give their own content preferential treatment.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has long argued that repealing net neutrality will be good for business innovation and will reverse what he saw a government overreach when the then-Democrat-led FCC voted in 2015 to reclassify broadband Internet as a common carrier under Title II subject to regulation by the agency.
Pai’s plan would see enforcement responsibility shifted to the Federal Trade Commission.
Wu has previously testified that antitrust agencies such as the FTC were too limited in scope to oversee the Internet and said in his op-ed that Pai’s argument that Internet companies need a better investment return to promote innovation is an insufficient one because some data has shown an increase in Internet investments since 2015.
The “more serious legal problem” Pai faces, Wu added, is explaining why net neutrality needs to be dismantled completely as opposed to having it simply weakened.
“This will be a difficult task. What has changed since 2004 that now makes the blocking or throttling of competitors not a problem?”, Wu wrote, referring to the year that then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell laid out the principles for “freedom” on the Internet.
“The evidence points strongly in the opposite direction: There is a long history of anticompetitive throttling and blocking — often concealed — that the F.C.C. has had to stop to preserve the health of the internet economy,” Wu wrote, echoing concerns by Internet advocates and Internet giants like Google and Netflix.
American consumers are also not on the Pai’s side, Wu noted, following another active public comment period.
“Telecommunications policy does not always attract public attention, but net neutrality does, and polls indicate that 76 percent of Americans support it,” Wu wrote. “The F.C.C., in short, is on the wrong side of the democratic majority.”
A study reported in August showed that 98.5 percent of unique user comments opposed Pai’s plan to undo net neutrality during the open comment period. However, it was reported that the FCC only considered comments with a serious legal argument and didn’t pay much mind to peoples’ opinions.
