"
AT&T doesn't like the idea of
new regulations
mandating unfettered access to the Internet, and recent comments from the Obama administration that
connected the issue to censorship in China have really gotten under its skin.
The telecom giant responded forcefully this week to remarks by White House deputy chief technology officer Andrew McLaughlin, who said that free speech and network neutrality are "intrinsically linked." Net neutrality rules are being crafted by federal regulators that would restrict Internet service providers such as AT&T from blocking or prioritizing content on the Web.
In an entry published on the Post Tech Blog and in comments at a telecom policy conference last week, McLaughlin compared censorship in China -- where President Obama's recent comments on open Internet values were blocked from Chinese Web sites -- to the need for net neutrality rules
so as to prevent corporations from acting as gatekeepers of information and speech.
"If it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it," McLaughlin said at the policy conference. The administration has made
net neutrality a
cornerstone of its technology agenda."
