FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Date: December 15, 2009
Contact: Liz Rose, 202-265-1490 x 32

Washington, DC -- Today, AT&T sent a letter to the FCC outlining their new approach to Net Neutrality rules. Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott made the following statement:

"After leading a rabid anti-Net Neutrality lobbying campaign for years, AT&T now submits a letter to the Federal Communications Commission purporting to offer common ground. What they are proposing would allow them to violate the core principle of Net Neutrality—letting them control the Internet by picking winners and losers in a pay-for-play scheme. That would destroy the free and open Internet, and the FCC should reject this false compromise out of hand.

"It is couched as a compromise, but it is little more than an effort to cajole a toothless rule out of the FCC. Make no mistake, AT&T opposes Net Neutrality. Their proposed solution is a bait and switch. As bait, they ask to return to a standard of nondiscrimination that was long applied to the telephone network. But they fail to mention that this standard was part of a system of pro-competitive common carriage rules that they have railed against applying to broadband networks for years. They haven’t changed their mind about common carriage. They are simply cherry-picking one piece of the old rules and calling it a compromise. The entire Net Neutrality debate is about the creation of a new system of nondiscrimination that fits broadband networks, not telephone networks --a debate the telephone companies forced by stripping away consumer protection rules from broadband under the Bush administration."

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