The Obama camp has pegged two long-time net neutrality advocates to head up their Federal Communications Commission Review team, according to
Wired. One is Wharton professor Kevin Werbach (see his
CircleID articles), who was a former FCC staffer, and is organizer of the annual tech conference
Supernova. The other is Susan Crawford (see her
blog), a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and traditionally very pro-consumer -- particularly when it comes to broadband deployment:
This March at a telecom policy conference in Hollywood, for example, Crawford bluntly told Ambassador Richard Russell, the White House' associate director on science and technology policy, that he lived in a fantasyland when he asserted that the United States' roll-out of broadband is going well.
That's in stark contrast to the current FCC, which has consistently issued
meaningless fluff reports on broadband penetration to suggest their pro-incumbent policies were actually accomplishing something
other than making AT&T and Verizon happy. Crawford, who has categorized US deployment as "dismal," has also argued that broadband should be a utility -- a hint towards government aided deployment. Werbach isn't going to give "free marketeers" and ISPs any warm fuzzies either. From one of his
recent articles on metered billing:
This "new idea" is actually the oldest one in the telecom book. Even with respect to the Internet, the debate over flat vs. usage pricing is a decade old. It was at the heart of the "modem tax" debate back when I was at the FCC. . . With the kind of rhetoric we're hearing today we should be wary about pricing decisions by network owners choking off future growth and development of Internet-based services.
No matter who the two help select to replace Martin, their track records would seem to indicate that AT&T and Verizon's control over the FCC may be at an end.
