August 2017

The comments submitted in the record so far serve only to illustrate that the Federal Communications Commission was right in 2015 to classify broadband as a Title II service and to adopt Open Internet rules, and that the DC Circuit was right to uphold it. Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans of both political parties support net neutrality. Just today, a broadband-industry funded study found that 60 percent of comments filed before the FCC support keeping the current rules in place, including 98.5 percent of unique comments.

Net neutrality opponents are wrong on the facts, wrong on the law, and attempt to rewrite history to support their agenda -- and the public is not behind them. If the FCC attempts to rely on the corporate PR, paid-for ‘economic’ analyses, and misstatements of legal precedent that currently support its proposal, it will lose in court -- but not before harming consumers and damaging competition in the meantime. Because the facts continue to show a need for rules, and because opponents have failed to substantiate any claims of alleged harms they cause, the Commission must keep the rules in place.

[Commentary] Once the floodwaters recede and the reconstruction begins, when can residents see their phone service — and broadband service — return. For rural residents of Texas still dependent on traditional landlines, the answer to that may be “never.”

Why never? Back in 2011, Texas deregulated its telephone system. Of particular relevance here, Texas made it ridiculously easy for phone companies to get rid of their “carrier of last resort” (COLR) obligations — the obligation for the incumbent telephone network to provide service to everyone its service territory. As a result, phone companies in Texas do not have a state-based legal obligation to repair or replace service once it goes down. So in places where the telephone network has been damaged or destroyed by Harvey, AT&T (the primary legacy phone company in the impacted area) has no state responsibility to restore service.

[Harold Feld is Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge]

The United Nations human rights chief said Aug 30 that President Donald Trump’s repeated denunciations of some media outlets as “fake news” could amount to incitement to violence and had potentially dangerous consequences outside the United States.

The rebuke by Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the high commissioner for human rights, at a news conference in Geneva was an unusually forceful criticism of a head of state by a United Nations official. al-Hussein was reacting to President Trump’s recent comments at a rally in Phoenix (AZ) during which he spoke of “crooked media deceptions” in reports of the violent clashes at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville (VA) that resulted in the death of a counterprotester. In Phoenix, the president’s words also appeared to whip up audience hostility toward journalists. “It’s really quite amazing when you think that freedom of the press, not only a cornerstone of the Constitution but very much something the United States defended over the years, is now itself under attack from the president himself,” al-Hussein said. “It’s a stunning turnaround.”