Net Neutrality to Protect a Marketplace of Ideas

Now that the FCC greenlighted the AT&T merger with BellSouth, let's look back at why it was so important that a central condition for its approval was the protection of Net Neutrality.

In regard to your Dec. 15 editorial “Merger Hold Up”: You state that net neutrality lost “resoundingly” in the last Congress. Yet the Snowe-Dorgan amendment, offered during Senate Commerce Committee consideration of major telecommunications legislation in June, was defeated by a 11-11 tie vote. And the underlying legislation was never brought to the Senate floor in large part because it did not include a meaningful net neutrality provision.

To further argue that net neutrality “has nothing to do with the merits of [the AT&T] merger” is to ignore statements by AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, who has publicly indicated his intent to discriminate and act as a gatekeeper between Internet content and consumers. He was quoted in Business Week as saying, in regard to Internet companies: “They don’t have any fiber out there. They don’t have any wires. They don’t have anything. They use my lines for free — and that’s bull.”

To allow any company to pick winners and losers completely undermines the open structure that has brought true innovation to the Internet. We must guarantee continued “neutrality” so that success on the Web is determined by the merit of one’s ideas — not by one’s ability to purchase access from corporate giants.

Of course this principle should be a guidepost for the FCC when they decide on this merger because as the father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, testified before Congress: The Internet is “innovation without permission.”

Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D., N.D.)
Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R., Maine)

Roberta Combs
President
Christian Coalition of America
Washington

Click here to read the original letter as printed in the Wall Street Journal's online edition