1 edit | Madison River? Madison River, the FCC's 2005 policy statement, and Brand X all predate Whitacre's remarks, and at the time, he was generally derided by people who understand how the internet works. Indeed, Whitacre had substantially backed off his statement within just a few months, which was good because it was really dumb. Lots of ISP executives were saying dumb things after Brand X and the Wireline Report and Order; executives of big lumbering companies aren't typically known for swift adaptation to change, to put it mildly (with a few exceptions).
It was activist groups (the ACLU in particular, early on) that turned the net neutrality issue into the monster it is today, because that's what activist groups do to be relevant: they create monsters to fight whether they're real or imagined, and in Ed Whitacre they found the monster that laid the golden egg.
Obviously subsequent response by ISPs--and the back and forth since then--has made the monster "ridiculous [and] often-incoherent," but to say that "AT&T started it" doesn't seem very accurate. |
