Stephen H. Wildstrom, a columnist for BusinessWeek Online, has changed his mind about keeping government from governing the Internet. Why? Because, he believes, governance by the private operators who now call the shots is not serving the public interest.Stephen H. Wildstrom, a columnist for BusinessWeek Online, has changed his mind about keeping government from governing the Internet. Why? Because, he believes, governance by the private operators who now call the shots is not serving the public interest.
Big telcos, he says, are making content decisions that impinge free speech and control pricing to the detriment of consumers and the Web itself.
“The fact is, the old Bell system that was broken up 25 years ago has reassembled itself into a duopoly that dominates the Internet backbone and both landline and wireless phone service,” Wildstrom writes “Verizon and AT&T are also among the largest Internet service providers. The old, overregulated AT&T was hostile to innovation, but as stodgy as it was, it saw itself as the steward of a public trust. The company’s lightly regulated successors view the world quite differently.”
Government has been taking a hands-off approach, allowing service providers to determine usage and pricing policies for the Web. That, says Wildstrom, “hasn’t served consumers well. And the Web is far too important to entrust the free flow of information to the shifting whims of a few big companies. Government must step in and tell them to leave our content alone.”
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