Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T on net neutrality” like “Chicken Little, Henny Penny, and Ducky Lucky," Copps writes
The “rants and wails of Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T over net neutrality" are like “Chicken Little, Henny Penny, and Ducky Lucky rushing to warn their friends of impending doom," wrote former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who is special adviser to…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Common Cause's Media and Democracy Reform Initiative, on the Benton Foundation’s blog (http://bit.ly/1x9Zv5b) on Wednesday. “'The sky is falling, the sky is falling,' they clucked and quacked ... But the sky wasn’t falling; it was just a tiny acorn bouncing harmlessly off Chicken Little’s head,” Copps wrote. The FCC’s decision on whether to base net neutrality rules on Title II “is much less dramatic than ‘The Sky is Falling ISP Threesome’ endlessly contend,” wrote Copps. “It is whether to ensure that the government agency charged since the 1920s with protecting consumers, competition, and innovation in telecom still retains these responsibilities in the advanced telecom world of the broadband era,” he wrote. “Why anyone other than self-interested businesses would ever have argued otherwise has always been beyond me, but three successive chairmen of the FCC bought into the idea out of some bizarre combination of ideology and industry friendliness.” AT&T, Comcast and Verizon had no immediate comment. Those who argue reclassification under Title II would be easy are “at best, naïve,” wrote Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology Executive Director Fred Campbell on his organization’s blog (http://bit.ly/1sQg19M) Wednesday. Campbell wrote that he met with members of the FCC’s General Counsel’s office, arguing among other things that broadband does “not meet the statutory definition of 'telecommunications.'” The meeting was Tuesday, according to an ex parte filing posted Wednesday in docket 14-28 (http://bit.ly/1DBtUgQ).