Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) on Wednesday sent a letter to the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, urging it to take net neutrality into consideration as it evaluates the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. Noting that “[n]et neutrality protects consumers by prohibiting broadband service providers…from picking and choosing which lawful Internet content will reach homes and offices across the country,” Sen. Franken endorsed principles of net neutrality and settlement-free peering arrangements as conditions of the deal going forward.
Sen. Franken further noted that while Comcast has repeatedly mentioned its ongoing net neutrality obligations required by the Federal Communications Commission as part of its acquisition of NBCUniversal, those obligations expire in 2018, “which raises the question of what happens after that time.”
The full text of the letter may be found here.
Previously, Sen. Franken quite vocally opposed AT&T’s proposed acquisition of wireless carrier T-Mobile.
Also calling for strong net neutrality rules and settlement-free peering arrangements in the past 48 hours is Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, who in a blog post yesterday acknowledged that the company is paying Comcast “a toll” to ensure that Netflix customers with Comcast as their ISP continue to receive a high-quality broadcast of its streaming video service.
posted by Anant Raut
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