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"Net Neutrality" Coiner Tim Wu Is Running For Lt. Governor of New York
speedplane (552872) writes Tim Wu, the popular Columbia Law Professor, author of The Master Switch, and the guy who coined the term Net Neutrality, is running for Lieutenant Governor of the great state of New York. He "has waged a shoestring anti-establishment campaign," that is well underway, and has even begun receiving attacks from the incumbent: "It has not always been smooth for Mr. Wu .... Surrogates for Mr. Cuomo have pounced on his admitted lack of 'message discipline' for comments he made comparing net neutrality to the suffragist movement (which he says were taken out of context) and sympathizing with Airbnb (which he says is 'fair game' because he has a 'wait-and-see approach' to regulating start-ups)."
It is about time we got some tea party democrats.
I know, tea party is a bad word, but anti-establishment is almost synonymous with it. It finally sound like we might see a democrat who is still actively supporting the working man instead of riding the coat tails of the real democrats who went before him.
While Wu is a smart, well-meaning guy, his coining the phrase "net neutrality" set back the public debate by a couple of decades. Introducing a new term for an old concept was, at best, dumb. If he had stuck with "common carrier" - a centuries old legal term - which is well understood, we'd probably have "net neutrality" today.
The US made telegraphs common carriers in the 1840s and later, telephones. The term also applies to railroads - whose bad behavior outraged farmers in the 1800s -and trucking companies. Telco lobbyists would have a much tougher case to make against common carrier than they do against the new-fangled "net neutrality."