Nancy Scola talks to a digital-media expert Susan Crawford on net neutrality and policy responses to Internet freedom:
So the system of public commenting at the FCC isn’t welcoming to anyone who isn’t a professional advocate, like the folks at Free Press?
That’s right. But it’s not only that. Those public advocates are under-resourced and under-recognized. So they get a lot of lip service from the policy-makers, who will say, “Well, we’ve heard from Group X or Group Y, and we considered their arguments,” and then they dismiss them. But, you know, there are hundreds of thousands of small businesses and entrepreneurs and even rock-ribbed Republicans who we would think would be quite upset about the absence of a level playing field for network access, and they aren’t being mobilized. They aren’t connected to those public-advocacy groups.
