Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski should be applauded for his announcement Wednesday that he would proceed on open Internet rules and for recognizing that "no central authority, public or private" should be a gatekeeper to the Internet. Unfortunately, his earlier plan more strongly protected Internet access.
While describing problems with Internet censorship overseas during my recent Senate Finance Committee testimony, I found it strikingly similar to our domestic struggle for Internet openness, known as net neutrality. Domestically or internationally, the principle of openness is the same -- and what we do here affects our credibility in fighting for Internet freedom abroad.
If the United States can't preserve open, neutral Internet access, our diplomats and trade representatives will be hard-pressed to object to Internet gate-keeping -- such as censorship and filtering -- by foreign countries. Whether a corporation wants to prioritize favored Internet traffic for commercial reasons, or a government wants to censor unfavorable traffic for political reasons, the same network tools, like deep packet inspection (DPI), are at work to control what gets through to end users, and when.
Add new comment