In a speech at the Brookings Institution, [FCC Chair] Julius Genachowski said the FCC must… preserve[e] Net Neutrality against increased efforts by providers to block services and applications over both wired and wireless connections. …
“If we wait too long to preserve a free and open Internet, it will be too late,” Genachowski said citing a number of recent examples where network providers have acted as gatekeepers: "We have witnessed certain broadband providers unilaterally block access to VoIP applications (phone calls delivered over data networks) and implement technical measures that degrade the performance of peer-to-peer software distributing lawful content. We have even seen at least one service provider deny users access to political content." ….
Genachowski, who was an architect of President Obama’s technology agenda, proposed that the agency adopt new principles that would prevent discrimination and require full transparency from ISPs that seek to manage their networks. The new principles are additions to the “Four Freedoms” endorsed by the FCC in 2005.
Genachowski asked the FCC to adopt all six principles as Internet rules that are “essential to ensuring its continued openness.” FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn have already indicated they support stronger Net Neutrality rules…..
Now the FCC has to actually write the new rules and invite comments from the public and interested parties.
To engage more public participation in the process, Genachowski announced that the agency would hold a series of public workshops on openness. In addition, the FCC launched a new Web site, www.openinternet.gov, so the public can “contribute to the process.”
From a rhetorician's standpoint, I will add quickly here that the figure of an "open internet" here seems to me much better than the "net neutrality" which has come to figure these debates. There is of course nothing in the least "neutral" about the facilitation of peer-to-peer democratization online, it is driven by a commitment to the specifically democratic construal of freedom that values equity and diversity, peer-to-peer, as against, for example, incumbent construals of freedom that favor outcomes preferred by stakeholders over others, outcomes typically stealthfully advocated through the deployment of under-specific terms like "innovation" (in the service of what? by whom?) and "competitiveness" (for what? among whom?). Like "neutrality" "openness" is still tapping into negative as against positive formulations of liberty, which probably cannot be helped given the utterly debased state of public discourse at this point, but it does pay to remember that negative formulations are powerful because they seem in advocating for non-interference rather than for substantial outcomes to be less controversial and hence better able to secure political values over time -- but that this is ultimately a mistaken assumption, since "non-interference" always relies for its force and intelligibility on a constellation of assumptions about substance (figuring the integrity with which one is not to interfere) that differ from positive liberty only in that they are taken for granted, sometimes without reason, treated uncritically, or even disavowed altogether, all to the detriment of sense. Although it is commonplace to figure freedom and liberty as an open space traversed by the free-agent (hence, one is "at liberty," hence taxes get figured in reactionary discourse as "burdens," encumbrances weighing down one's free course through empty space) -- and both "neutrality" and "openness" tap into this figurative commonplace -- it seems to me better by far to figure freedom as a dense filling-up or stage-setting or orchestration of the material world that is richly capacitating (hence, one is rendered "free to" do this or to do that, hence taxes are indispensable investments in capacitation).
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