Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Committee, my name is
Lawrence Lessig, and I am a professor of law at Stanford Law
School. For the past decade I have been researching the relationship
between technology and Internet policy, and in particular, the
relationship between the architecture of the Internet and innovation.
I am therefore happy to have the opportunity to address the question
that this Committee is now considering — whether Congress
should enact rules to protect network neutrality.
To answer that question, this Committee must keep in view a
fundamental fact about the Internet: as scholars and network
theorists have extensively documented, the innovation and explosive
growth of the Internet is directly linked to its particular architectural
design. It was in large part because the network respected what
Saltzer, Clark and Reed called “the ‘end-to-end’ principle” that the
explosive growth of the Internet happened. If this Committee wants
to preserve that growth and innovation, it should take steps to
protect this fundamental design.