New at Reason: Peter Suderman on Saving the Internet from the FCC

April 28, 2010

The Internet is in trouble. And it's all George W. Bush's fault. That's what Net neutrality proponents would have the public believe, anyway. On April 6, a federal appeals court nullified the FCC's censure of Internet service provider Comcast for degrading the bandwidth of some users of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. Since then, neutrality nuts have worked themselves into a minor panic. Supporters now say it's up to the FCC to reregulate what the Bush administration deregulated. This would entail changing the classification of broadband from an "information" service under Title I of the 1996 Communications Act to a "telecommunications" service under Title II. But as Associate Editor Peter Suderman writes, Bush isn't to blame—and it's not clear that the FCC actually has the authority to change broadband classification at all.

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