FCC workshop on Innovation, Investment and the Open Internet
Speaking before a workshop on "Innovation, Investment and the Open Internet," Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski told an audience that the FCC is engaged in a months-long process of ensuring a "free and open Internet."
"The question is how to preserve an Internet that generates innovation, investment, job creation, and economic growth," he said. "It's obviously critically important to the future of this country that we do that. An open Internet will be an essential part of our platform in this century."
The panel brought together industry professionals to not only provide their views on the rules that the FCC should put forth to ensure an open Internet, but to also convince the agency that it needs to do so. As Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker put it, "I'm still unconvinced that this is a problem we should be addressing and I would not want anything to interfere with the successful deployment of a broadband future.”
Sally Shipman Wentworth, a member of the Internet Society and a former policy adviser for the White House, argued that the Internet has been successful because it's "based on openness, transparency, decentralization, and its distributive nature."
"Because it's open, engineers, citizens, and businesses of all sizes can participate in its development," she said. "This distributed and transparent approach is the Internet model of development."
But perhaps with that argument Wentworth should read an editorial by one of our members, LULAC, that raises the point about whether supplementing the Internet with more rules will actually continue to encourage the current Internet model of development.Wentworth pointed out that the interests of network managers and content providers have sometimes been at odds, but warned that "policy should not be written around narrow assumptions about how bandwidth is managed." Because network managers distribute content in a certain way now does not mean that the technology won't change a decade from now.
Indeed, Safe Internet noted this point in the comments it filed yesterday in response to the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which proposes to create two new principles on Internet openness in addition to the existing four principles approved by the FCC in 2005. In the statement, Safe Internet recommended that the FCC focus on addressing Internet safety and security, where much work remains to be done, so that the priority is creating a safe Internet.
Safe Internet pointed out that the FCC’s proposed preemptive regulations only state that they are not intended to adversely affect law enforcement, public safety, and national and homeland security. A principal concern is that the sweeping and ambiguous nature of the proposed regulations creates the potential for serious unintended consequences that could undermine Internet safety and security, law enforcement, public safety, and national and homeland security.
The next FCC workshop will be titled, "Consumers, Transparency, and the Open Internet" and held January 19 in Washington, DC. The workshop will "explore consumer choice and user control of the online experience, and the importance of transparency for those interests."