James F. Booth

For more than 25 years, James Booth has provided consulting and legal services to telecommunications carriers and to enterprise companies that manage their own telecommunications networks. Since June of 2009 he has also served as General Counsel of Spread Networks, LLC, which is the industry leader in the construction and operation of low latency high speed networks. Before joining Spread he was General Counsel for OnFiber Communications, a competitive telecommunications provider, and was the sole attorney for Qwest Communications International in support of its construction of an 18,800 mile fiber optic network spanning the United States. Earlier he was lead counsel for U S WEST in its wireless and cable television ventures in the United States, Europe and Hong Kong.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Solving the Net Neutrality Problem Is Actually Simple

The Federal Communications Commission is sitting on a mess. This week the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. decided in Verizon Communications v. the FCC (pdf) that the commission didn’t have the authority to impose its open Internet order on Verizon (VZ) or anyone else. There is a simple fix for this mess. It does not require any new laws from Congress. It already has the support of the Supreme Court. If the FCC actually wants to ensure net neutrality, it will have do something that every regulator in every other developed country did a long time ago. (It will also turn Verizon litigiously apoplectic.) It has to unmake the mistake it made in 2002, when it failed to classify cable Internet providers as telecommunications services. Doing so would solve everything.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-17/solving-the-net-neutrality-problem-is-actually-very-very-simple
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