• Los Angeles Times, Monday, January 8, 2007 11 AM

Part of the reason AT&T took an abrupt about-face last week in the ongoing debate about Net Neutrality is the fact that CEO Ed Whitacre, who confirmed the turnaround last week, spurred the debate to begin with. As recently as late 2005, Whitacre, then CEO of SBC Communications, called Google and Yahoo "nuts" for expecting free use of his company's vast cable network to deliver bandwidth-eating content.

Actually, it's not so surprising after all, given that one of the Federal Communications Commission's provisions for the new AT&T, which the government organization finally approved on Dec. 29, was that the telecom behemoth be forced to treat all online content the same. The new AT&T comes out of the marriage of SBC and BellSouth Corp., which has made it the dominant phone company in 22 states, as well as the nation's largest Internet Service Provider.

Without that kind of massive influence in Washington, the Net Neutrality controversy--perhaps the main tech issue of 2006--is now expected to disappear. The omission of AT&T, coupled with a Democratic House and Senate, means a Net Neutrality bill ought to pass--eventually. AT&T still opposes such a bill, but the FCC has forced it to keep its mouth shut as part of its agreement to let the merger go through.

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