New U.S. Push to Regulate Internet Access
WASHINGTON-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski has decided to reregulate Internet lines to protect net neutrality, siding with consumer groups and Internet companies worried that Internet providers have too much power.
Context & Ripple Effects
The FCC’s September 2009 neutrality initiative had already cast the agency as a traffic cop in the fight over network access, after Congress had not resolved the issue. Genachowski’s decision turns that policy push into a more direct effort to constrain the leverage of Internet providers.
The move also sits alongside Genachowski’s stated broadband goal of 100 Mbps service to 100 million homes: the FCC is treating the terms of access, not only deployment targets, as part of broadband policy.
First-order effects
- Internet providers face a renewed federal regulatory check on how they manage access to online services, while consumer groups and Internet companies gain an FCC chairman aligned with their neutrality concerns.
Second-order effects
- Broadband-policy debates shift from voluntary provider conduct toward the FCC’s authority to police access terms, increasing the stakes for providers and online companies in the agency’s rulemaking process.
Third-order effects
- If the FCC sustains this approach, Internet access becomes a more explicitly regulated bottleneck: network owners’ control over traffic is subject to public-interest rules rather than left solely to commercial terms.
The trend: U.S. broadband policy is moving toward access-control regulation, pairing network-expansion goals with rules meant to limit provider gatekeeping.