Science & Tech Quote by Michael K. Powell

Powell is smuggling a deregulatory argument into what sounds like neutral engineering prose. By contrasting the phone system as “engineered around an application” with the Internet’s “layered model,” he’s not just describing networks; he’s choosing a metaphor that decides the policy outcome. Telephone service is cast as closed, vertically integrated, and therefore naturally suited to old-school rules. The Internet is framed as modular and agnostic, a platform whose magic depends on keeping the pipes indifferent to what flows through them.

The key move is the phrase “separate applications from infrastructure.” That separation is the intellectual foundation of the end-to-end principle: innovation happens at the edges, not at the center. If the network’s job is merely to move packets, then the state’s job is to avoid treating Internet providers like telephone monopolies. Powell, as an FCC chair in the early 2000s, was operating in the shadow of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and amid fierce fights over broadband classification, “information service” vs. “telecommunications service,” and what would later crystallize as net neutrality. His wording aims to make regulatory restraint feel like fidelity to the Internet’s design, not an ideological choice.

Subtext: once you accept the layered model as the Internet’s essence, any attempt to regulate the infrastructure layer (common carriage obligations, nondiscrimination mandates) can be portrayed as category error, even sabotage. It’s a persuasive trick because it borrows the authority of architecture: code as destiny, and policy as mere maintenance of what engineers already “intended.”