The FCC just voted to begin “Destroying Internet Freedom” and overturn net neutrality

Posted on May 18, 2017 by Caleb Chen
fcc ajit pai

Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to kill net neutrality under the guise of “Restoring Internet Freedom.” The lone FCC commissioner in favor of the Open Internet Order and the net neutrality rules we had enjoyed over the last few years, Mignon Clyburn, said the change would be better named “Destroying Internet Freedom” instead of “Restoring Internet Freedom.”

Clyburn summarized the current plan to let ISPs loose with only a pinky promise to protect net neutrality rules. Clyburn said that the FCC plan:

“Contains a hollow theory of trickle-down internet economics, suggesting that if we just remove enough regulations from your broadband provider, they will automatically improve your service, pass along discounts from those speculative savings, deploy more infrastructure with haste, and treat edge providers fairly.”

Today’s FCC vote starts a process to dismantle net neutrality

The FCC’s net neutrality rules that currently regulate Internet service providers (ISPs) as Title II common carriers forbids them from throttling or prioritizing certain types of internet traffic are now on the way out. The second result of today’s FCC vote is that the FCC will consider whether or not they should be involved in regulating ISPs’ net neutrality commitments anyways. That is to say, your comments still matter.

Ajit Pai has said that he is for an open internet, and that the FCC is open to listening to your comments. Comments to the FCC now number over 2 million and there is now a new comment period from May 18th to August 16th. Tell the FCC that net neutrality should still be protected, even if not by Title II.

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9 Comments

  1. roygerbil

    The FCC under Pai has become an absolute joke. Unless a piano happens to fall on his and Trump’s heads in some sort of freak accident, this crap is just going to keep happening. For whatever it’s worth, there’s a group of people trying to raise money to sue the FCC as sort of an alternate approach.

    7 years ago
  2. Menasheh

    “… the net neutrality rules we had enjoyed over the last few years” – Had we? I hadn’t noticed anything…

    7 years ago
    1. Adondriel

      Yea, we have, because of the way those rules work, you wouldn’t notice them. It’s only once they’re gone that you will notice they are missing. ISPs will start creating fast-lanes and charging certain websites more money to not have their traffic throttled.

      7 years ago
      1. Menasheh

        And that did happen before net neutrality?

        7 years ago
      2. TomTomA

        Netflix and streaming content users are bandwidth hogs, making bank off the access provided and paid for by others. Why shouldn’t they have to pay for the resources they consume?

        7 years ago
        1. Ryan Rimmel

          Because they already do. This allows the ISP to change them a special fee for being on their service (after traveling through countless miles of other people’s backbones) and also charge you a fee for the service of providing them… if they want to grant them access at all. Its not profitable for them to offer the service and it directly competes with one of their core business models, and they have shareholders. If they didn’t discontinue allowing Netflix access, I’d see about firing the CEO until I got one that did.

          I don’t have a second ISP choice locally, so if they decide Netflix isn’t allowed on their network, I just lose access to Netflix. This is basically letting the ISP pick winners and losers instead of the market. I support a Free Market, therefor I support Network Neutrality.

          7 years ago
          1. TomTomA

            Let me fix that last sentence for you: “I support free markets therefore I support government coercion and regulation of businesses so that everyone can be forced to operate the way I want them to”.

            7 years ago
  3. Alejandro Avina

    WE NEED NET NEUTRALITY!!!!!

    7 years ago
    1. Menasheh

      It’s pretty clear that privateinternetaccess wants you to believe that. Perhaps they would have to pay for fast lanes in order to keep their vpn service up to par.

      7 years ago