Obama Appoints Net Neutrality Champions To Review The FCC
Wired reports:
The Obama-Biden transition team on Friday named two long-time net neutrality advocates to head up its Federal Communications Commission Review team. Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and Kevin Werbach, a former FCC staffer, organizer of the annual tech conference Supernova, and a Wharton professor, will lead the team’s review of the FCC.
Both have been harsh critics of the Bush administration’s telecom policies [and strongly signal] an entirely different approach to the incumbent-friendly telecom policymaking that’s characterized most of the past eight-years at the FCC. This March at a telecom policy conference in Hollywood, for example, Crawford bluntly told Ambassador Richard Russell, the White House’ associate director on science and technology policy, that he lived in a fantasyland. “We’re doing very badly, and we’re in a dismal state,” she said of U.S. high-speed internet access. And in a final introductory statement (that’s likely to send shivers down the spines of telecom company executives) she said that she believes internet access is a “utility.”
