Regulatory classification

 Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune (R-SD) says the average American is not likely to be swayed in the 2018 midterms by Senate Democrats forcing a vote on reinstating the net neutrality rules. “I think they see it as a really hot political issue [that] gets their base kind of energized.

Maine Sens Angus King (I-ME) and Susan Collins (R-ME) said they’ll support new legislation to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s vote to scuttle Obama-era network neutrality standards.  Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) announced recently that he has enough support to force a Senate vote to invalidate the FCC’s controversial Dec. 14 decision.

[Commentary]  If you care about preserving network neutrality, the most important thing you could possibly do would be to run for political office on a platform that promises to protect the free and open internet and to roll back regulatory capture by big telecom.

Democratic senators rejoiced on Jan 9 that they had secured enough votes to force the Senate to debate whether to restore the US government’s recently repealed network neutrality rules. But their celebrations could prove short-lived on Capitol Hill, where Republicans control both chambers of Congress — and can easily scuttle any attempt to revive regulations that required internet providers to treat all web traffic equally.  In speech after speech, though, Democratic Sens mostly sidestepped those issues.

This is the year, friends.  The year when the battle for an Open Internet pits the three self-proclaimed wise men of the Federal Communications Commission against an overwhelming majority of the American people.  Every index I have seen—be it popular poll, volume of pleas to Congress, or expressions of anger toward the FCC—makes it crystal clear that we the people want an open internet and an end to ever-increasing monopoly control of our telecom and media markets.  Most Americans would agree with the great Justice Louis Brandeis: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated i

Democratic Sens who are trying to force a vote on reinstating network neutrality rules have hit a key milestone. A Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would reverse the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality repeal needed 30 co-sponsors in order to get a Senate vote. Sen Claire McCaskill (D-MO) announced that she has signed on to be the 30th co-sponsor. 

The Trump administration’s recent decision to kill the Open Internet Order has a lot of network neutrality advocates fearing the worst.  Although it remains to be seen whether that will happen, a small but growing number of users are taking matters into their own hands by exploring community- or municipal-owned, operated and funded internet access as a cheaper, faster and more neutral alternative to using large commercial internet service providers.

The Federal Communications Commission has finally released the language of its controversial Restoring Internet Freedom order, which the Republican majority approved Dec 14 against visceral opposition from Democrats--edits to the item continued through this week. Here are some key passages of the final language of a decision that Internet services have celebrated, Democratic members of Congress are trying to overturn, and activists say spells the end of an open internet as we know it.

The Internet Association, a leading lobbying group for Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Twitter and other tech giants, said that it would be joining the coming legal crusade to restore the US government’s network neutrality rules. The Internet Association specifically plans to join a lawsuit as an intervening party, aiding the challenge to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s vote in December to repeal regulations that required internet providers like AT&T and Comcast to treat all web traffic equally.

The Federal Communications Commission rejected calls to delay ending network neutrality rules over a flawed public comment system, saying it had not relied on thousands of identical or suspicious submissions in its decision making. “We reject calls to delay adoption of this Order out of concerns that certain non-substantive comments (on which the Commission did not rely) may have been submitted under multiple different names or allegedly ‘fake’ names,” the commission said in its final order released late on Jan 4.