Many years ago, I taught a semester of law school as an adjunct. I assigned the students to read the FCC’s 2005 Internet Policy Statement. I was dismayed to discover that, after doing the reading, none of them had even heard of the concept of “reasonable network management.” How was that possible? Reasonable network management is not mentioned in the main text, but in footnote 15 which says that the principles are “subject to reasonable network management.” Given the centrality of the “reasonable network management” concept to the net neutrality debate, I was rather irritated. “Understand this before you graduate,” I warned them. “Real lawyers read the footnotes!”
I thought of that after reading Geoffery Manne’s and Berin Szoka’s piece about VZ/SpectrumCo over on CNET.