The Father of Net Neutrality Returns to Do Battle With Comcast
His views are likely to be in the spotlight over the next few months, as the FCC takes another shot at regulating service providers and Wu makes a run for the Lieutenant Governorship of New York State. His platform: fighting corruption, helping small business, terminating the proposed merger between cable giants Comcast and Time Warner—a merger that would further reduce competition in the world of internet access. His inspiration: Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party of a century ago. “If you go back to the 1912 platform of the Progressive Party, they say that the number-one problem with this country is an unholy alliance between a corrupt government system and big business,” he says, arguing that this is today’s biggest problem too. “I’ve been there and I’ve watched it first-hand in net neutrality. We have a problem with an invisible government.”
Why Your Wi-Fi Router Is Legal
Wu wrote his original net neutrality brief three years before the creation of YouTube. Back then, the internet was a jaggedy, annoying, and rather slow operation, and the net neutrality movement was largely an effort to prevent internet service providers from blocking some rather basic online tools: voice-over-internet-protocol services such as Skype, virtual private networks that let you securely connect to corporate servers, and even home wireless routers. “In the old contract, AT&T defined it as a federal offense to attach a Wi-Fi router,’ Wu says.
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