Over 190 Engineers and Tech Experts Tell The FCC It's Dead Wrong On Net Neutrality

One of the more notable recent filings from the Open Internet docket comes from a collection of engineers, technologists, professors, current and former Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and ICANN staffers, and numerous network architects and system engineers. Collectively, these experts argue that the Federal Communications Commission is not only making a mistake in killing net neutrality protections, it doesn't appear to understand how the internet actually works: "Based on certain questions the FCC asks in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), we are concerned that the FCC (or at least Chairman Pai and the authors of the NPRM) appears to lack a fundamental understanding of what the Internet's technology promises to provide, how the Internet actually works, which entities in the Internet ecosystem provide which services, and what the similarities and differences are between the Internet and other telecommunications systems the FCC regulates as telecommunications services." The engineers single out numerous technical mistakes in the FCC's Notice for Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), including incorrect assessments and conflation of the differences between ISPs and edge providers (Netflix, content companies), incorrect claims in the NPRM about how the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 functions, how firewalls work, and more. But the engineers and architects also warn, as countless others have before them, that not having meaningful rules in place will result in an "balkanized" internet that will be nothing like the one that drove decades of innovation.