Commentary
Pro-Neutrality Genachowski To Head FCC
- by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, March 3, 2009
Genachowski, a Harvard Law classmate of Obama's, was largely responsible for the president's pro-neutrality tech platform, which he was touting as far back as October 2007. For that reason, advocates like Public Knowledge quickly cheered news of Genachowski's appointment. "As the architect of President-elect Obama's Technology and Innovation Plan, it is clear that he understands the importance of open networks and a regulatory environment that promotes innovation and competition to a robust democracy and a health economy," Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn said in a statement.
Of course, much has changed since late 2007. Most notably, the FCC last summer came out with a pro-neutrality ruling. Former FCC head Kevin Martin, a Republican, sided with the two Democrats on the commission and ruled that Comcast violated neutrality principles by slowing peer-to-peer traffic.
In some ways, that ruling has made the issue less pressing. After all, it's hard to argue that new laws are needed when the FCC is already sanctioning companies for violating the principle that Internet service providers should let subscribers access their choice of content.
Yet, it's far from clear that the FCC's ruling will hold up in court. The agency based its decision on principles it issued in 2005, which stated ISPs shouldn't discriminate based on content or applications. But the agency never codified those principles -- an omission that's given Comcast the ammunition to appeal the ruling on the ground that the FCC had no authority to sanction the company. That appeal is currently pending.
Additionally, Martin told lawmakers that he was opposed to new neutrality laws because the agency didn't need new legislation to police ISPs. But legislation would have certainly gone a long way towards scuttling Comcast's argument that it was allowed to impede peer-to-peer traffic.
Wendy Davis is a Senior Writer at MediaPost. You can reach Wendy at wdavis@mediapost.com
I'm interested to see how Mr Genachowski rules on Google's desire to subsidize edge caching at ISPs while remaining an advocate of net neutrality. Google's argument is that its requests are no different than other edge caching services such as Akamai or Limelight.
Unlike those other providers, however, Google appends data to the URL to support other Google services, such as Google's analytics. While the method behind Google's "Quality Score" remains secret, historically such analytics data has been used to provide weighting to web pages in the name of usability. This weighting may well have a role in determining whose page is at the top of the list of search results for a given query. With over 200 million searches a day, the economic value derived from the URL routing associated with this edge caching translates into value that no other edge caching provider is capable of realizing.
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/12/net-neutrality-and-benefits-of-caching.html