Law Commons^™

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 …

Network Neutrality: Competition, Innovation, And Nondiscriminatory Access, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

The best proposals for network neutrality rules are simple. They ban abusive behavior like tollboothing and outright blocking and degradation. And they leave open legitimate network services that the Bells and Cable operators want to provide, such as offering cable television services and voice services along with a neutral internet offering. They are in line with a tradition of protecting consumer's rights on networks whose instinct is just this: let customers use the network as they please. No one wants to deny companies the right to charge for their services and charge consumers more if they use more. But what …