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From Slashdot:
"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, member of the board of directors of ICANN, and OneWebDay founder, as well as Kevin Werbach, former FCC staffer, organizer of the annual Supernova technology conference, and a Wharton professor, will lead the Obama-Biden transition team's review of the FCC. 'Both are highly-regarded outside-the-Beltway experts in telecom policy, and they've both been pretty harsh critics of the Bush administration's telecom policies in the past year.' The choice of the duo strongly signals an entirely different approach to the incumbent-friendly telecom policy-making that's characterized most of the past eight-years at the FCC."I'm happy with these picks of course, even though I've always been cautious about net neutrality legislation. Not because I don't want a neutral network, but because of the oversized role big business plays in crafting such legislation. I've had this long Cato Institute study queued up for the past week but haven't been able to get through more than the introduction: "The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation." It seems to get at the major point behind my nervousness:
New regulations inevitably come with unintended consequences. Indeed, today's network neutrality debate is strikingly similar to the debate that produced the first modern regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. Unfortunately, rather than protecting consumers from the railroads, the ICC protected the railroads from competition by erecting new barriers to entry in the surface transportation marketplace. Other 20th-century regulatory agencies also limited competition in the industries they regulated. Like these older regulatory regimes, network neutrality regulations are likely not to achieve their intended aims. Given the need for more competition in the broadband marketplace, policymakers should be especially wary of enacting regulations that could become a barrier to entry for new broadband firms.Still, I'm less nervous about legislation in an Obama admin then I would have been under Bush! And beyond that specific legal question it's just nice to see some people being picked who actually know what they are talking about.