Regulatory classification

Internet users outraged by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to gut Network Neutrality are planning to protest at Verizon retail stores across the country on Thursday, Dec. 7, one week before an expected vote at the FCC. In some cities, protesters will march from Verizon stores to lawmakers’ offices. The protests will highlight the company’s role lobbying to kill rules that prevent telecom giants from charging extra fees, engaging in censorship, or controlling what internet users see and do through discriminatory throttling.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission is expected to release its draft Network Neutrality Order on Wednesday, November 22—just before Thanksgiving. This timing has created an uproar among some opponents of the Order, who claim that the timing is merely part of what is admittedly an unfortunately common strategy among governments to release unpopular news when it thinks the public is least likely to see it. In this case, however, the claim has several problems.

[Commentary]  As the Federal Communications Commission gets ready to abandon a decade of progress on net neutrality, some in Congress are considering how new legislation could fill the gap and protect users from unfair ISP practices. Unfortunately, too many lawmakers seem to be embracing the idea that they should allow ISPs to create Internet “fast lanes” -- also known as “paid prioritization,” one of the harmful practices that violates net neutrality.

• While broadband network speeds have improved substantially over the last decade, the web’s performance has stagnated from the end user point of view. 
• The disconnect between broadband and web speeds suggests that the “virtuous circle” hypothesis created by the Federal Communication Commission to justify common carrier internet regulation is false.
• A system for capturing passive measurements and sharing them among internet service providers, web developers, and other responsible parties may be useful for accelerating the web experience.

Network neutrality is on its deathbed, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, appointed by President Donald Trump, is about to pull the plug. But not everyone on the FCC is gunning to undo the hard-won net neutrality protections. The FCC started soliciting comments from the public on Chairman Pai’s proposal to end network neutrality in May. More than 22 million comments came in, but there have been so many serious irregularities with the process that FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel thinks the FCC needs to slam on the brakes.

[Commentary]  Recently, 19 towns across Colorado voted to allow the exploration of creating a local, public alternative to expensive private providers. Fort Collins (CO) voters went the furthest, passing a measure to finance an assessment of starting a city-owned broadband utility, which would aim to provide faster service at a cheaper price. That means residents could have a say in whether a new public network maintains the principle of network neutrality, whatever the Federal Communications Commission decides in the future.

Apparently, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will reveal plans to his fellow commissioners on Nov 21 to fully dismantle the agency's Obama-era network neutrality regulations in a major victory for the telecom industry in the long-running policy debate. The FCC will vote on the proposal in December, some seven months after it laid the groundwork for scuttling the rules that require internet service providers like Comcast or AT&T to treat web traffic equally. Pai’s plan would jettison rules that prohibit ISPs from blocking or slowing web traffic or crea

Federal regulators are expected to unveil their plans for reversing Obama-era rules that require internet service providers to treat all web traffic equally, a move that could fundamentally reshape the internet economy and consumers’ online experience. The changes, expected to be adopted at the Federal Communications Commission meeting in mid-December, would open the door to a wide range of new opportunities for internet providers, such as forming alliances with content firms to serve up their webpages or video at higher speeds and quality than those without such deals.  Such “paid prioriti