Public Must Fight to Maintain Net Neutrality

Details

Author(s):
  • Lawrence Lessig
Publish Date:
April 17, 2008
Publication Title:
San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 2008, pg. B7
Format:
Op-Ed or Opinion Piece
Citation(s):
  • Lawrence Lessig and Ben Scott, Public Must Fight to Maintain Net Neutrality, San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 2008, pg. B7.

Abstract

Professor Lawrence Lessig co-authored a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed about net neutrality, the subject of an FCC hearing hosted by Stanford Law School on April 17:

The Internet is an engine of economic growth and innovation because of a simple principle: net neutrality, which assures innovators that their next great idea will be available to consumers, regardless of what the network owners think about it.

No previous mass media technology has been so remarkably open. Traditional media – newspapers, radio, TV – have gatekeepers standing between consumers and producers, with the power to control content. The Internet eliminates the gatekeeper.

Now, however, the Internet’s unprecedented openness is in jeopardy.

Comcast, AT&T and Verizon have been lobbying to kill net neutrality. They say they won’t build an information superhighway if they can’t build it as a closed system. No other industrialized country has made that devil’s bargain, and neither should we. Without net neutrality, online innovation is vulnerable to the whims of cable and phone companies, which control 99 percent of the household market for high-speed Internet access. And Silicon Valley venture capitalists are unlikely to bet the farm on a whim…