Vice

Summer 2017, the West Virginia state legislature decided to take some leftover funds for water and sewer projects and reinvest it in another essential public utility: the internet. These funds were evidently needed, because half of all counties in the state—27 of 55—have already applied for a piece of the pie.

In a blog post, AT&T lobbyist Bob Quinn tried to argue that the immense criticism being levied at the Federal Communications Commission for its decision to scrap net neutrality is based largely on “misinformation” and “rhetorical excess.”  "We will not block websites, we will not throttle or degrade internet traffic based on content, and we will not unfairly discriminate in our treatment of internet traffic (all consistent with the rules that were adopted—and that we supported—in 2010, and the rules in place today.)”

The belief that the Federal Trade Commission will be able to fill in for the Federal Communications Commission on net neutrality doesn’t hold much water. When it comes to net neutrality, the FTC is ill-equipped to regulate the industry in a number of ways, and all we have to do is look at the the way internet service providers used to act. Unlike the FCC, the FTC has little to no ability to create its own regulations. It also, by design, only acts after the fact, which hardly protects consumers, particularly if the shady behavior isn’t noticed right away by the powers that be.

Network neutrality as a principle of the federal government will soon be dead, but the protections are wildly popular among the American people and are integral to the internet as we know it. Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians, whose whims and interests change with their donors, net neutrality must be protected by a populist revolution in the ownership of internet infrastructure and networks. In short, we must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure.

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chariman of Alphabet, says the company is working to ferret out Russian propaganda from Google News after facing criticism that Kremlin-owned media sites had been given plum placement on the search giant’s news and advertising platforms.  “We’re well aware of this one, and we’re working on detecting this kind of scenario you’re describing and deranking those kinds of sites,” Schmidt said, after being asked why the world’s largest search company continued to classify the Russian sites as news. Schmidt name-checked two state-owned enterprises.

The federal government is going to make it even more difficult for people on Tribal Lands to be connected to the wider world. In fact, most Native Americans who were counting on the Federal Communications Commission to continue with policies that many tribal communities were counting on to bring more service to far-flung tribal lands may see even cell service reduced.

“When you kind of think about all the ways the internet affects your life and how 40 percent of people in Detroit don’t have that access you can start to see how Detroit has been stuck in this economic disparity for such a long time,” said Diana Nucera, director of the Detroit Community Technology Project. Nucera is part of a growing cohort of Detroiters who have started a grassroots movement to close that gap, by building the internet themselves. It’s a coalition of community members and multiple Detroit nonprofits.