Meet Susan Crawford, the co-chair for the Federal Communications Commission transition team for Barack Obama, and special assistant to the President in the Obama Administration (she has a blog here). A former law professor at the University of Michigan–one presumes that she has either departed permanently, or is on leave–Professor Crawford has some interesting ideas concerning the Internet. Namely, she wants it treated like a public utility (subscription required):
Crawford stressed that the stimulus money is a down payment on future government investments in the Internet. “We should do a better job as a nation of making sure fast, affordable broadband is as ubiquitous as electricity, water, snail mail or any other public utility,” she said.
Of course, the use of the term “public utility” denotes nationalization:
Most of the time when I talk about the need to treat internet access like a utility, I get amused smiles.
That’s the thing we have to change — the idea that it’s unthinkable (amusing, even) that we could take this increasingly singular but private relationship of people to broadband internet access and make it a public relationship.
But end-users really don’t care whether their provider is a cable company or a telephone company — they think they’re getting the internet. They’re probably not even aware that a private company is providing internet access to them. And there are even a few people out there in the U.S., despite our best efforts, who don’t understand that these private companies have every incentive to prioritize and manipulate their way into showing us “channels” instead of the internet.
One wonders whether the Obama Administration’s penchant for nationalizing anything and everything under the sun will ever be abated.
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