FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn

Nearly one year ago, during the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee’s (BDAC) inaugural meeting, I urged this Committee to consider the needs and the capacity of low-income communities as you develop policy recommendations. I also reminded the Committee that all municipalities, areas, and communities are not created equal. It was thus my hope that the BDAC’s consensus-based approach would incorporate the concerns expressed by local government representatives of this Committee.

On December 14, 2017, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to dismantle the agency’s 2015 net neutrality rules. As a long-standing champion of net neutrality and one of the two FCC Commissioners who vociferously objected to the decision, Commissioner Clyburn believes it is important for consumers and small businesses to understand what happens next.

What protections will I lose online as a result of the FCC majority’s repeal of net neutrality? Once the FCC’s net neutrality repeal action goes into effect, broadband providers will be allowed to:

The agreement announced today between the FCC and FTC is a confusing, lackluster, reactionary afterthought: an attempt to paper over weaknesses in the Chairman’s draft proposal repealing the FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules. “Two years ago, the FCC signed a much broader pro-consumer agreement with the FTC that already covers this issue. There is no reason to do this again other than as a smoke and mirrors PR stunt, distracting from the FCC’s planned destruction of net neutrality protections later this week.”

FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn announces the appointment of April Jones as Policy Analyst and Special Assistant. Jones joins Commissioner Clyburn’s office from Hausfeld LLP, a global antitrust law firm, where she was an attorney focusing on complex civil litigation matters in antitrust and consumer protection law. Prior to this role, she clerked at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, where she worked primarily on the E-commerce and Telecommunications portfolios.

As an unwavering champion of network neutrality, FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn believes in setting the record straight. Chairman Pai made a number of claims and predictions in his dissent from the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order.

My fellow FCC Commissioners would benefit from hosting their own public forums and listening to the concerns raised by consumers and small businesses. Doing so would allow them to hear first-hand on what it means to access the internet without fear that their broadband provider will slow down or block their favorite online applications and services. My colleagues would benefit from hearing concerns about broadband providers’ poor service, surprise price hikes, and inadequate customer support, so, why won’t they?

The FCC’s latest efforts to quote “reform” the Lifeline Program, will actually decrease the availability of service less for those who stand to benefit the most. As you well know, connecting the unconnected is no easy task. Costs of just a couple dollars a month can be insurmountable for families that struggle to put food on the table each day. But what the FCC majority proposed to do earlier this month, is to take away no-cost service offerings, and eliminate the business model of 70% of providers in the current market

Is it true that Chairman Pai’s proposal would eliminate Net Neutrality? Yes. It eliminates all prohibitions against blocking and throttling (slowing down) applications by broadband providers, and enables them to engage in paid prioritization and unreasonable discrimination at the point of interconnection. It ignores thousands of consumer complaints and millions of individual comments that ask the FCC to save net neutrality and uphold the principles that all traffic should be created equal. 

In just two days, many of us will join friends and family in celebrating the spirit of Thanksgiving.

Nov 16, the Federal Communications Commission majority will continue down its destructive path of adopting a series of actions that fail to put consumers first. They will make it more difficult for low-income Americans to access affordable communications services; they will adopt a so-called ‘voluntary’ television standard that has even more outstanding and unanswered questions than the February Notice of Proposed Rulemaking; they will shred consumer and competition protections in times of technology transitions; and they will open the door to massive media consolidation at the expense of l