Crawford Dismisses GOP Net Neutrality Bill as Ploy to Advance Harmful Telecom Rewrite
Proposed GOP net neutrality legislation drew the ire of Susan Crawford, a former Obama administration adviser and now a Harvard Law School visiting professor. She tore into the draft bill, which Republicans have said they want to make a bipartisan…
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compromise, and criticized the broader efforts from Republicans in both chambers to overhaul the Communications Act. “Although calculated to address concerns about online fairness, its real thrust is to remove or constrain the FCC’s authority in a host of areas,” Crawford wrote in a blog post Wednesday for Medium. “The bill will draw a swift presidential veto.” She said the legislation has a “host of problems” and said it “so transparently shackles” FCC authority. Crawford doesn’t think the bill is “real,” she said: “What’s actually going on is that the net neutrality issue is being thrown under the bus by the carriers and the GOP in favor of a much more important goal: getting rid of the existing Telecommunications Act entirely.” She praised the “sensible” current statute and doubted the public interest would fare well in any telecom rewrite. Industry heavyweights will “use the occasion of an Obama veto” of net neutrality legislation “and a hymn to bipartisanship to press as hard as they can to get an act they do like passed -- before there’s a risk of losing GOP control of Congress again,” Crawford said. “My prediction: Such an act will not require carriers to serve everyone in every community with world-class, reasonably priced Internet access. It will allow a flawed system to get even worse, all to make the rich carriers even richer.”