An organization discovered that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) have used $572 million in attempts to persuade the FCC and other government offices since 2008.
And, with a recent Verizon lawyer leading the FCC’s charge on current net neutrality protections, it’s clear these works have certainly paid off after a rocky start.
“The FCC’s ruling, slated to be declared later this summer, will be a definite indicator of the influence of corporate cash in a Trump administration,” writes the report. “Public opinion is on the side of following the Obama administration’s net neutrality plans, which limited Internet companies from blocking, slowing or giving preference to different websites.”
Congressional lobbying forms show that Comcast alone has paid nearly $4 million on lobbying Government on net neutrality problems from the end of 2014 through the beginning quarter of 2017. Comcast was, of the way, an early member in the conversation after it was exposed repeatedly lying about suppressing all upstream BitTorrent connections back in 2008.
Writer Andrew Jerell Jones also leads out how Comcast-owned NBC News, CNBC and MSNBC can rarely be tried to reveal their parent company’s lobbying on this matter, or in fact cover net neutrality in their news broadcasting much at all. Even purportedly “progressive” MSNBC has been often criticized for rarely talking about the subject.
“NBC News, CNBC, and MSNBC haven’t published their company’s lobbyist spending on Capitol Hill through that time period,” he notes. “And extreme of a few news segments on CNBC – with each big tech figures showing their support for net neutrality or telecom giants balustrade against it Comcast networks have remarkably featured or even mentioned the online issue on their shows at all, despite their large Capitol Hill lobbyist spending on net neutrality.”
Again, Comcast and other larger ISPs’ attacks on net neutrality come notwithstanding broad, bipartisan support for the rules.
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