Internet/Broadband

Is social media a net benefit to American society? Given the increasingly important role that social media plays in our daily lives, this is a question that all of us, including groups like the Media Institute, need to grapple with. Now, I will tell you up front that I don’t have an answer. And I won’t touch on particular policy issues, like social media’s role in elections. What I have in mind is something broader. With that, let me suggest two trends that I believe have lowered our discourse—and how social media has enabled each. First: Everything nowadays is political.

As the Federal Communications Commission moves forward with plans to repeal Obama-era net neutrality rules, a new Morning Consult/Politico poll shows bipartisan support for keeping the regulations in place. Fifty-two percent of registered voters in a Nov. 21-25 poll said they support the current rules, which stipulate that internet service providers like Comcast Corp., AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc.

[Commentary] The internet is a set of pipes. It’s also a set of values. Whose? The people who consider it a great social equalizer, a playing field that has to be level? Or the ones who own the network and consider themselves best qualified to manage it? It’s a philosophical contest fought under the banner of “net neutrality,” a slogan that inspires rhetorical devotion but eludes precise definition. Broadly, it means everything on the internet should be equally accessible — that the internet should be a place where great ideas compete on equal terms with big money.

[Commentary] I’ve got bad news for everyone who is working overtime to protest Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s campaign to eliminate net neutrality: You are being tricked. Pai is running a kind of shell game, overreaching (“go ahead and run all the paid prioritization services you want, Comcast!”) so that we will focus our energies on the hard-to-pin-down concept of net neutrality—the principle of internet access fairness that he has vowed to eliminate.

An examination of how Comcast's net neutrality promises have changed over time reveals an interesting tidbit—Comcast deleted a "no paid prioritization" pledge from its net neutrality webpage on the very same day that the Federal Communications Commission announced its initial plan to repeal net neutrality rules.  Starting in 2014, the webpage, corporate.comcast.com/openinternet/open-net-neutrality, contained this statement: "Comcast doesn't prioritize Internet traffic or create paid fast lanes." That statement remained on the page until April 26 of this year, according to page captures from

Chairman Pai’s attack on Twitter is like a boxer losing a fight and taking wild and erratic swings. Preventing hate speech and bullying behavior online is not the same thing as allowing cable companies to block, throttle and extort money from consumers and the websites they love. Twitter is an amazing platform for left, right and center. Donald Trump might not be President without it, and Chairman Pai's plan to kill net neutrality will put Comcast and AT&T in charge of his Twitter account.

Defenders of the Federal Communications Commission's current Open Internet rules are plotting out a legal challenge to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to repeal them. This would be the latest in a series of court battles over FCC net neutrality authority. Several groups including Public Knowledge, Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and the Computer & Communications Industry Association expressed interest in a legal challenge, which may consume much of 2018.

As internet service providers have poured millions of dollars into killing net neutrality protections, they have made one common refrain: that the Federal Communications Commission's fairly modest net neutrality rules somehow destroyed network investment in the United States. Never mind that any time a journalist fact checks these claims they find they're indisputably false.

US internet traffic is projected to grow two-and-a-half times over the next five years, according to a new USTelecom analysis of annual Internet Protocol (IP) traffic data from Cisco’s Visual Networking Index(link is external), a continuation of explosive growth over the past decade. A massive shift toward online consumer video is the primary driver of traffic growth.

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?