Internet/Broadband

The head of the Federal Trade Commission hailed her agency’s ability to protect online competition ahead of a likely regulatory rollback that would make the agency responsible for maintaining a free and open internet.  The FTC was responsible for policing the internet before the 2015 expansion of net neutrality regulations, and if Pai’s order passes, the agency will re-inherit that authority. “The FTC’s ability to protect consumers and promote competition in the broadband industry isn’t something new and far-fetched,” Acting FTC Chairwoman Maureen Ohlhausen said.

Network neutrality regulations underpin the digital lives of many Americans, yet it is challenging to survey the public on such an inherently complex and technical subject. For this reason, Pew Research Center set out to analyze the opinions of those who had taken the time to submit their thoughts to the Federal Communications Commission.  Among the most notable findings:

The internet is dying. Sure, technically, the internet still works. Pull up Facebook on your phone and you will still see your second cousin’s baby pictures. But that isn’t really the internet. It’s not the open, anyone-can-build-it network of the 1990s and early 2000s, the product of technologies created over decades through government funding and academic research, the network that helped undo Microsoft’s stranglehold on the tech business and gave us upstarts like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix.

It usually doesn’t take much to get people on the internet worked up. To get them really worked up, make the topic internet regulation. In the week since the Federal Communications Commission released a plan to scrap existing rules for internet delivery, more than 200,000 phone calls, organized through online campaigns, have been placed to Congress in protest. An additional 500,000 comments have been left on the agency’s website. On social media sites like Twitter and Reddit, the issue has been a leading topic of discussion.

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, blasted Twitter for what he said was a push to “discriminate” against conservatives. He  accused Twitter of hypocrisy for its criticism of the FCC's plan to repeal the Obama-era regulation. “When it comes to a free and open Internet, Twitter is part of the problem,” Chairman Pai said.

[Commentary] The Republican majority at the Federal Communications Commission will soon repeal net neutrality. What does this mean in practice? In a sentence: slower and more expensive internet service. To democratize the internet, we need to do more than force private ISPs to abide by certain rules. We need to turn those ISPs into publicly owned utilities. We need to take internet service off the market, and transform it from a consumer good into a social right. Access to the internet is a necessity.

CoSN (the Consortium for School Networking) CEO Keith Krueger issued the following statement on the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality plans:
 

The Federal Communication Commission released a proposed update to the Rural Health Care Program last week, in an effort to satisfy the rapidly expanding need for broadband telehealth programs.

After the painful and demoralizing 2015 decision to insert government regulations into the middle of the greatest man-made invention of our time, I was never quite sure that this day would come. The Commission had no enforceable net neutrality rules prior to December 2010. That unregulated regime resulted in the creation of Google in 1998, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. There is also no concrete evidence of network or consumer harm.  

The most obvious reason that network neutrality violations have been rare since Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent is that the Federal Communications Commission has enforced net neutrality rules since 2010 (aside from a year-long interlude without rules caused by a Verizon lawsuit). But to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, this just proves that the rules aren't necessary. "Because of the paucity of concrete evidence of harms to the openness of the Internet, the [2015 net neutrality] Order and its proponents have heavily relied on purely speculative threats," Pai's proposal says.