If we allow this opportunity-creating technologythe freedom and openness it needs to reach its full potential

t]here is one Internet, which should remain open for consumers and innovators alike, although it maybe accessed through different technologies and services.

Ihad other areas of concern about something less than a bright-line nondiscrimination rule, keeping “reasonable network management” within bounds, and the substitution of monitoring for the certainty of enforcement in too many areas

There is more that I would have liked in this Order. Iwould have preferred a general ban to discourage broadband providers fromengaging in “payfor priority”—prioritizing the traffic of those with deep pockets while consigning the rest of us to a slower, second-class Internet.

provided a framework under which business could do its job of building and managing this great communications enterprise—making handsome profits in the process—while operating within a public policyframework giving them certaintyand giving consumers the protections theyneeded and deserved.

Because of the errors of those previous Commissions, a court told us earlier this year that the legal framework upon

Congress said that local telephone companies with choke-point control of physical infrastructures would have to unbundle their transmission networks.Sadly, both of these policies were, in fairly short order, decimated bythe two Commissions that served between 2001 and 2009.

do the right thing

It wasn’t all that long ago (well, at least, when you’re my age) that one network—AT&T—ran the whole show.

In spite of all the monopolist’s alarm bells that this decision meant the end of network qualityand the end of reliable service as we knew it, just the opposite came to pass. The idea of having a network that couldn’t discriminate against innovators who wanted to improve it finallybegan to break the choke-hold that the gatekeeper had on the system.

Internet Policy Statementthat contained the basic rights of Internet end-users to access lawful content, run applications and services, connect devices to the network and enjoy the benefits of competition. Now, at long last, we adopt at least some concrete rules to prevent gatekeepers from circumventing the openness that made the Internet the Internet and from stifling innovation, investment and job creation.

previous telecommunications and media technologies, also conceived in openness, eventually fell victim to consolidated control bya few powerful interests, speculative mania by investors, and mistaken government policies which assumed that wise public policywas no public policy.

Allowing gigantic corporations—in manycases, monopolyor duopoly broadband Internet access service providers—to exercise unfettered control over Americans’ access to the Internet not only creates risks to technological innovation and economic growth, but it poses a real threat to freedom of speech and the future of our democracy.

turning point in the struggle to ensure the continued openness of the Internet against powerful gatekeeper control.