What Did AT&T Inc. (T) CEO Say About President Obama’s Proposal For Protecting Net Neutrality?

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is one of the biggest telecommunication company, which operates primarily in United States. President Obama proposed a plan to protect neutrality, which primarily targets Internet traffic equality by all Internet Service Providers (ISP’s). His proposal includes four primary steps such as no blocking, no throttling, increased transparency and no paid prioritization. He urges Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to implement stronger rules for protecting net neutrality, which in his view is not equal to all. But AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) CEO, Randall Stephenson feels that these old rules might be inappropriate for internet. He talked on CNBC about this.

“[…] Here is the internet, which has been a phenomenon by any definition. Multiple billions of dollars are being poured into this ecosystem, into the technology. So there are some concerns people will have about how the internet will be treated in the future. There is going to be blocking, there is going to be pay prioritization, where people get fast lanes and slow lanes. The President articulated that we need to guard against these things. We all got that. What has created the noise, the problem is the President wants to put the internet into regulations that were written in 1934. [..] These regulations were written for the black rotary dial telephone,” Stephenson said.

Stephenson added that these new regulations might add a lot of new taxes and additional prices, which was not originally there with AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) packages. He mentioned that putting these new regulations will increase the average internet bill for a family by $19 a month. He thinks that the regulations must try to increase the broadband penetration, but he feels that the increased price might just work in the opposite direction.

Stephenson said that President’s concerns about misusing the system and implementing some rules to protect it understandable, but he feels that taking a 2014 system and shoving into a 1934 rules might not work well.

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