Law Commons^™

Is There A Role For Common Carriage In An Internet-Based World?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

During the course of the network neutrality debate, advocates have proposed extending common carriage regulation to broadband Internet access services. Others have endorsed extending common carriage to a wide range of other Internet-based services, including search engines, cloud computing, Apple devices, online maps, and social networks. All too often, however, those who focus exclusively on the Internet era pay too little attention to the lessons of the legacy of regulated industries, which has long struggled to develop a coherent rationale for determining which industries should be subject to common carriage. Of the four rationales for determining the scope of common …

Why Have A Telecommunications Law? Anti-Discrimination Norms In Communications, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes a vision of what telecommunications laws’ central goals should be in coming decades, and what kind of legal instruments will serve those goals. The telecommunications law, I suggest, has been preoccupied with three projects: allocating rights, managing discrimination, and achieving various social goals, like indecency regulation. This paper argues that in the future the main point of the telecommunications law should be as an anti-discrimination regime, and that the main challenge for regulators will be getting the anti-discrimination rules right.

The view advanced here, while much popularized over the last decade, has deeper roots reaching back to …