Obama Appoints Net Neutrality Champions To Review The FCC
Wired reports:
The Obama-Biden transition team [a week ago] 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 Obama-Biden transition team’s review of the FCC.
Both have been harsh critics of the Bush administration’s telecom policies, [and 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 when he asserted that the United States’ roll-out of broadband is going well. In regards to high-speed internet access in the U.S., Crawford says, “This is like water, electricity, sewage systems: Something that each and all Americans need to succeed in the modern era. We’re doing very badly, we’re in a dismal state.” And, in an 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.”
