Schmidt and McAdam also warned against government agencies or web service providers getting between internet users and their online experience.
“The minute that anyone, whether from government or the private sector, starts to control how people use the internet, it is the beginning of the end of the net as we know it,” they said.
Net neutrality took a hit in April when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all internet traffic flowing over their networks.
That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose such net neutrality obligations on broadband providers.
The court case centered on Comcast’s challenge of a 2008 FCC order banning the company from blocking its broadband subscribers from using an online file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent.
The commission, at the time headed by Republican Kevin Martin, based its order on a set of net-neutrality principles it adopted in 2005 to prevent broadband providers from becoming online gatekeepers of content flowing over their lines.
Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition–which includes web giants like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and the education technology organization EDUCAUSE–said in an April 6 statement that the court decision means the FCC is “now unable to police the internet against anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior by broadband providers” and could endanger the agency’s national broadband plan, which has broad support among educators.
Sixteen percent of the 3,439 community college campuses in the U.S. have access to the kind of high-speed internet service that is available at more than 90 percent of research universities, according to the FCC.
A group of more than 20 open internet and consumer advocacy organizations sent a letter to Genachowski Oct. 21 that said more than 1.6 million Americans have declared their support for net-neutrality laws.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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