Network Equality

Tuesday, July 14, 2015 at 12:00 pm
Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
23 Everett Street, Second Floor, Cambridge, MA  02138
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This event will be webcast live on this page at 12:00 pm

One of the few clear priorities of the federal Communications Act is to ensure that all Americans have reasonably comparable access to the Internet without respect to whom or where they are.  Yet, in spite of this, the main focus of policymakers and legal scholars in Internet policy today has been on promoting innovation, a concept that Congress barely invokes in the statute.  The flagship regulatory intervention for this approach is “network neutrality,” a rule that forbids Internet providers from blocking or interfering with users’ connections.  This Article critiques this prevailing approach.  While it has virtue, the singular focus on innovation could starkly exacerbate existing racial, ethnic, and class disparities because the quality of users’ Internet connections refract through those persistent demographic variables.  The Article thus calls for a fundamental return to the distributional equality principle at the heart of communications law.