Telecommunications Policy

A worldwide tussle over Internet access policy is playing out right now, and many countries are closely watching what the United States does. This talk will provide a brief overview of the U.S. regulatory structure for high-speed Internet access.

"As foreshadowed at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, federal regulators this week took the first formal step into investigating complaints about how Internet service providers, such as Comcast, manage peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on their networks "

A handful of public-interest groups have filed a petition (PDF) with the Federal Communications Commission asking it to prevent cellular service providers from blocking text messages from advocacy groups and advertisers. Filed by Public Knowledge, the Consumers Union, EDUCAUSE, Free Press, and four other groups, the petition cites a couple of recent examples of text-message blocking by cellular carriers.

The higher education community, which has hosted many of the creators of the Internet and which has woven this technology into every aspect of education, now has a responsibility to work to defend an Internet policy framework based on user control, innovation, trust, and openness/competition.

EDUCAUSE has once again joined a broad coalition of association, corporations and public interest groups encouraging Congress to pass legislation permitting local governments to build and deploy municipal broadband networks under the Community Broadband Act of 2007 (S.1853/HR3281).

Though legislation is unlikely this year, education groups say they haven't given up the fight to keep network owners from prioritizing web traffic according to payment.

The author give a good overview of the current Net Neutrality forecast.