Susan Crawford is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and the author of “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.”

The news that the head of the Federal Communications Commission just proposed that the agency should use its authority — under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — to oversee high-speed Internet access services should be welcomed by all who use the Internet.

But let's be clear about what this is and isn't.

He's not proposing to "regulate the Internet" or the websites of businesses that use the Internet to reach customers. This would not constrain what Americans can say online, nor would it constrain the extraordinary innovation that has come about because of the Internet's borderless and permission-free nature.

Tom Wheeler is simply saying that the F.C.C. should have authority over the wires, tubes and towers. The private Internet operators, however, are free of oversight.

Tom Wheeler is simply saying that the F.C.C. should have solid legal authority over the physical wires, tubes and towers located in the United States that move information from Point A to Point B. And that's all he's doing.

Today, the private operators of this basic, two-way communications infrastructure — in effect, the general-purpose replacement for the telephone network — are free of any oversight. Left to their own devices, the companies selling Internet access will reasonably act to discriminate against existing competitors, make entry by new competitors more difficult, and make more money any way they can from their existing infrastructure — including by collaborating with one another to divide markets.

The F.C.C. has been worried about this kind of thing for a while now. But because a prior F.C.C. had taken a sharp deregulatory turn under then-chairman (now cable industry advocate) Michael Powell — who put high-speed Internet access in an unregulated category under the Telecom Act — the Obama-era F.C.C. was powerless to address these problems. The D.C. federal court of appeals twice told the F.C.C. that it couldn't regulate with one hand, by imposing "Open Internet" rules, for example, and deregulate with the other.

Now, the chairman is saying that the F.C.C. will return to the solid regulatory ground that made the commercial Internet possible in the first place. High-speed Internet access is indeed a regulated service. This may not be good news for Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable — who, among other things, want to make more money by demanding extra payments from popular online companies like Netflix — but it is great news for every other part of American society.



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