Glenn Anderson, a former Washington state legislator and consultant on education policy, emphasises that education is a highly regulated public utility in which rules can govern everything, from what goes into textbooks to how many children there are in a class.
Obama had called on the FCC to classify broadband as a public utility and adopt open internet rules that would ensure that "neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online".
A federal judge in Minnesota has ruled that the state's public utility commission cannot apply its telecommunications regulations to Vonage Holdings, a start-up company that allows consumers to place voice calls over the Internet.
As a public utility, it is subject to government regulation..
As a public utility, it is subject to government regulation.
For public utility installations in built-up areas, radio communication is usually ruled out by the difficulty of finding antenna sites and unobstructed line-of-sight radio paths.
Ashley Brown, a former Ohio public utility commissioner who now heads the Harvard Electricity Policy Group, said that, as a rule, stripping regulators of decision-making power is "poor public policy".
Rules of justice, by contrast, are normative human conventions that promote public utility.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is planning tough new rules for regulating the internet that will treat high-speed internet as a public utility, like electricity or water.
The rules, which change the FCC's classification of internet service providers by treating them like a public utility, attempt to prevent companies that provide internet connections from privileging traffic from one source over another.
