FCC Chairman Ajit Pai now “has the motive that he needs to roll back” the 2015 Open Internet Order, which limits large telecommunications corporations from managing online content and challenges that all traffic be handled equally. He also has an associate in Carr, who was a deputy for large telecom companies.
Activists and Democratic legislators also raised an alert on Thursday as Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) met with some of the nation’s biggest Internet service providers (ISPs) including Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T to consider scrapping net neutrality, which some have identified “the First Amendment of the Internet.”
Writing for News, Dipayan Ghosh and Joshua Stager reviewed why Open Internet advocates should be worried about the meeting:
Walden states he needs to bring a limit to the “ping-pong games of regulation and litigation.” But this ping-pong game only survives because the big ISPs require on endlessly re-litigating this determined law. Walden also requires examining legislation on net neutrality, citing a serious and misguided draft bill from 2015. That bill would gut net neutrality and the FCC’s jurisdiction to address future problems. It would have been a tragedy for the open internet and an unnecessary government intervention into an online marketplace that is working well under current law. It does not need to be resurrected in 2017, and it is not the opening point for discussion that Walden seems to think it is.
The conference came in the middle of an unusual surge in aid for net neutrality at the grassroots. As Free Press, an Open Internet support group, noted last month: “The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) docket for public criticisms on the current net neutrality rules has now surpassed all records.”
Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), and many other outstanding senators highlighted the increasing support for net neutrality in a letter asking Pai to “extend the observation period for its plan to undo the Open Internet Order and net neutrality protections.”
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