PPI Senior Fellow Hal Singer was quoted in a story by WJLA Channel 7 regarding yesterday’s Internet Slowdown Day, a protest organized by net neutrality advocates unhappy with new Open Internet rules being proposed by the Federal Communications Commission:
Hal Singer, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, supports the FCC proposal. He says, “Fast lanes is a loaded term. What I prefer to say is ‘just say no to slow lanes.’”
He continued, “It’s a political campaign. These guys on the other side are very effective at this game. They would like all of these priority delivery offerings to be available for free. Well, that’s very convenient for them. I say, on the other hand, if you don’t want the priority delivery offering, it’s a free country. You can always decline it.”
Singer says – for the average small business or Internet start-up – there’s no demand for such high-speeds. Meanwhile, major telecom firms point out video traffic consumes enormous bandwidth and costs more. And they warn that treating broadband like a utility would harm innovation.
“We’re going to freeze the current technology in place,” Singer said. “And that’s not good for anyone, particularly Internet consumers, because we’re going to keep coming up with new fancy applications that we want and who knows what kind of speeds are required to support those applications.”
Read more on WJLA Channel 7.
