What Comes Next?
Steve Goodman has been practicing telecommunications law since 1983, when he began working at the Federal Communications Commission. He now represents a wide variety of clients, including telecommunications equipment manufacturers, satellite service providers and international carriers.
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more" — those words were written by William Shakespeare more than four hundred years ago about the battle of Agincourt in the play Henry V.
But those words seem apt today to describe the Battle over Net Neutrality, which was recently renewed by the FCC in its proposed rulemaking entitled "Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet."
The history of FCC regulation of the Internet had its origins in the Computer Inquiries that began in 1966 to address the emerging enhanced services, and produced the Computer I, Computer II, and Computer III regulatory regimes. Under those decisions, the telephone companies could participate in the enhanced services sector, originally through fully separate subsidiaries, and then subsequently through non-structural safeguards.
Then when Congress adopted the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it codified the Commission's policy of not regulating enhanced services — denominated as information services — and declared in section 230(b) that "It is the policy of the United States ... to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation."