Susan P Crawford, Columnist

New FCC Head Must Reclaim Authority Over Telecom

September 17, 2013 at 6:41 PM UTC

Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School, is the author of "Captive Audience." Her book "The Responsive City," with co-author Stephen Goldsmith, will be published in September. In 2009, Susan Crawford served as special assistant to President Barack Obama for science, technology, and innovation policy. She is a former law partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale). She is the founder of OneWeb Day, a global Earth Day for the Internet held each Sept. 22. She earned a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, and a law degree from Yale University.

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As the Federal Communications Commission gets a new chairman, probably this month, the agency faces historic resistance from the companies it is meant to regulate. The giant companies that sell access to the Internet are working on multiple fronts to ensure that no regulator has any real authority over them.

In a hearing last week before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, a lawyer for Verizon Communications Inc. argued that when the FCC deregulated high-speed Internet access services in 2002, it gave up any authority to require that network access providers not discriminate in the way they provide their transport services to end-users, other networks and content providers such as Netflix and Google.