Cable lobby head frets 'Alice in Wonderland' network neutrality plan

Federal regulators are needlessly going down the rabbit hole by toying with broad new rules for the Internet, according to the country’s top cable lobbyist.

“You’re going to make this tectonic shift to radically transform the entire regulatory framework in order to solve a minor legal problem associated with the smaller rules,” said Michael Powell, the head of the nation’s top cable lobbying group, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. “I’ve never seen such an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ series of events in my career." “While it’s self-serving, there has not been a deep-enough, honest-enough examination by the President or anyone else about what Title II really means,” he added, referring to the legal authority governing rules for public utilities. “The consequences of this are going to be, at best, six to 10 years of prolonged ambiguity, uncertainty and confusion in a market that has settled and stabilized 20 years ago,” Powell said.

[raise your hand if you were a broadband subscriber in 1994]