Administration, AT&T spar over Internet regulations
Published: November 27, 2009, 12:30 am
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WASHINGTON — AT&T doesn’t like the idea of new regulations mandating unfettered access to the Internet, and recent comments from the Obama administration that connected the issue to censorship in China have really gotten under its skin.
The telecom giant responded forcefully this week to remarks by White House deputy chief technology officer Andrew McLaughlin, who said that free speech and network neutrality are “intrinsically linked.” Net neutrality rules are being crafted by federal regulators that would restrict Internet service providers like AT&T from blocking or prioritizing content on the Web.
In an entry published on the Post Tech blog and in comments at a telecom policy conference last week, McLaughlin compared censorship in China — where President Obama’s recent comments on open Internet values were blocked from Chinese Web sites — to the need for net neutrality rules so as to prevent corporations from acting as gatekeepers of information and speech.
“If it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it,” McLaughlin said at the policy conference.Net neutrality is an issue that the administration has made a cornerstone of its technology agenda.
Those comments did not sit well with AT&T’s chief lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, who issued an angry response. He said it was “ill-considered and inflammatory” to connect censorship in China to the practices of American ISPs, whom he said do not threaten free speech.
“It is deeply disturbing when someone in a position of authority, like Mr. McLaughlin, is so intent on advancing his argument for regulation that he equates the outright censorship decisions of a communist government to the network congestion decisions of an American ISP. There is no valid comparison, and it’s frankly an affront to suggest otherwise,” Cicconi said.
The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy defended McLaughlin’s comments. “A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history,” the office said in a statement. “Mr. McLaughlin was simply reiterating the administration’s consistent support for the importance of an open Internet — both at home and abroad.”
Cicconi has been a vocal opponent of net neutrality rules. Last month, he asked the company’s 300,000 employees to tell the Federal Communications Commission ahead of a critical vote on the issue that the proposed new rules were extreme and could deter future investment in broadband Internet networks.
The agency later unanimously passed a rule-making proposal that could lead to stronger and broader net neutrality rules.
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