I spent this week in Washington DC, focusing on policy and legislation. Comptel held its policy summit on Tuesday, and I lobbied in the House and Senate on Wednesday. Capping off the week, today the FCC voted for strong open Internet rules which will protect consumers from unreasonable behavior by carriers.
It is important to draw the distinction between regulation of the Internet, and regulation of carriers. The FCC’s order will disallow carriers from discriminating against sources of traffic that their customers choose to access via the Internet. This is common carriage at its core, and as a carrier, I am supportive of being regulated as a common carrier by the FCC.
I don’t believe we would have gotten here if the access marketplace in the US was truly competitive. Regulation became necessary because consumers have so few choices for their access to the Internet. If consumers could easily choose from many carriers, I believe this would have prevented the issues we have seen.
I take some responsibility for this marketplace failure, and I know that we need to work to deliver more consumers a great competitive choice from Sonic. We are working hard to expand our reach, to improve performance and to increase the value of our service. We will continue that mission with renewed vigor in 2015. Please tell a friend about Sonic today.