Why the AT&T Deal is a Milestone for Net Freedom
December 28th, 2006 by tkarrColumbia Law Professor Tim Wu has written a throrough analysis of AT&T’s Net Neutrality concession. The deal, struck as a condition of the $85 billion merger between AT&T and BellSouth, may be remembered as “an important moment in Internet history,” Wu writes.
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Public interest advocates negotiated the agreement with a purpose: to prevent the Internet from moving from being “lively” and “decentralized” toward “much more centralized control.”
Wu writes: “At a level of theory, the language in the agreement is premised on a belief in the merits of a neutral network, and in particular its cultural, political, and economic benefits. The preservation of an open communications network as a catalyst for these sectors, without unfairly restricting AT&T’s business, appears to be the motivating force.”
Read Professor Wu’s full analysis.
December 29th, 2006 at 7:17 pm
Cicconi et al. must be worth the money AT&T is paying them.
While it’s a remarkable achievement to have gotten AT&T to make even these concessions, the concessions themselves are probably less removed from AT&T’s intended strategy than this analysis would have us believe. As David Burstein notes, “AT&T has always intended to use what they are calling their ‘IPTV network’ for the priority customers, and hasn’t even put the QOS equipment in place on the 1998 ‘wireline broadband Internet access service.’” Indeed, it seems ‘wireline broadband Internet access service’ is going to remain a neutral dirt-road while AT&T paves an adjacent discriminatory highway. Susan Crawford echoes a similar concern in her blog pointing to a service to be offered by AT&T as “AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled” and distinguished from “wireline broadband Internet access service.” Is there really a last sentence that’s supposed to block “any mischief that might be conducted by renaming broadband services into an excluded category in order to evade the rule?” Am I missing something?
Finally, (and this is certainly a more contentious complaint of mine) I couldn’t give a toss about introducing competition into the cable television market. I’d be more interested in introducing competition into the broadband internet access market. To that end, I’d suggest that if AT&T wants to compete against cable television they ought to have to upgrade their network’s capacity to a point at which they can offer the service without having to impose non-neutral QoS.