Consumerist

[Commentary]
Claim: "Network neutrality has hurt investment and the broadband industry." Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai keeps making this claim, so we’ll keep debunking it.
Claim: “We support net neutrality, but just want to get rid of Title II.” A federal court ruled in early 2014 that the legal underpinning for the FCC’s rules was no good, and strongly implied the best way to square that circle would be common carrier classification. Without it the FCC did not have the legal authority to make ISPs adhere to rules about blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization of content.
Claim: "You can’t use old law because the internet is new technology." This is where we get to outright, bald-faced hypocrisy, instead of disingenuous misdirection.
Claim: “We should leave this to Congress.” In the hyper-partisan, hyper-polarized, frankly completely bonkers political world of 2017, getting Congress to act on anything is an uphill battle, to put it mildly. Getting them to do it in a bipartisan way is like herding unicorns.

A group of Internet industry executives and politicians came together to look back on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and to do a little crystal-ball gazing about the future of broadband regulation in the United States.

Former Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Michael Copps was among the presenters, and he had sharp words for the audience about the “insanity” of the current wave of merger mania in the telecom field and the looming threats of losing net neutrality regulation. Unlike many of the other presenters at the conference, Copps, was anything but retrospective when he stood to speak.

“I’m not here to celebrate,” he began, “I’m here to advocate.” And the landscape he laid out is indeed not one to cheer for. He led off by agreeing with the several executive speakers that true competition is the way of the future, and the best way to serve consumers.

“But we haven’t given competition the chance it needs,” he continued, before referring to how poorly US broadband compares on the global stage. “We have fallen so far short that we should be ashamed of ourselves. We should be leading, and we’re not. We need to get serious about broadband, we need to get serious about competition, we need to get serious about our country.”

Broadband competition is indeed scarce in the United States, and the looming wave of “merger mania” is unlikely at best to improve the situation for anyone.

[Commentary] With every word he writes, recently installed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler shows he has little interest or belief in network neutrality as most consumers understand it.

In another flimsy attempt at defending his position on “fast lanes” -- i.e., allowing Internet service providers to charge more to content companies seeking priority access to end-users – Chairman Wheeler contends that consumers should do what Verizon and other telecoms want because well, it could take a while to do it correctly.

Once again, Chairman Wheeler completely glosses over the fact that the only reason a federal appeals court gutted the previous neutrality rules was because a shortsighted FCC never thought to categorize Internet service providers as vital communications infrastructure.

As numerous supporters of a true net neutrality have repeatedly pointed out, reclassifying ISPs would likely mean the FCC could reinstate the old rules (and possibly more stringent ones) and survive a legal challenge. He once again points to this so-called “blueprint” that the appeals court laid out in its opinion as a way to “create Open Internet rules that would stick,” without regard to whether or not those rules result in an Internet that is open.