Title II Critic Jeb Bush Joins GOP Presidential Crowd

Former Florida governor and current FCC and Title II critic Jeb Bush has officially joined the race for the White House.

Bush, while on a visit to the Iowa Ag Summit back in March, said that the FCC's decision to reclassify Internet access under Title II regs is "one of the craziest ideas I've ever heard," according to multiple reports at the time.

Bush, who officially announced his candidacy Monday (June 15), joins a crowded field of Republican candidates, a field also crowded with title II critics.

Bush also suggested that one of the backers of Title II was already getting buyers remorse: “The people who were concerned about this, the content providers like Netflix and others, have now disowned this,” he said.

That was a reference to a technology and media conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley last week, at which Netflix CFO David Wells said that the company was "probably not" pleased that stronger net neutrality rules had morphed into Title II.

Following that, Netflix said it stood by the FCC decision and, according to a podcast of Wells' presentation, he did appear to be saying that while ideally the result Netflix wanted would have been achieved without Title II

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.