14 DAY TRIAL // The Federal Communications Commission has finally voted to roll back net neutrality regulations, deciding to ignore thousands of comments, as well as the entire tech industry.
The members of the Commission led by Ajit Pai voted 2-1 to eliminate the regulations put in place by the former leader of the FCC, as well as to roll back the classification of home and mobile Internet service providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.
Pai came up with a new proposal - the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking - which eliminates the Title II classification and seeks comment on what should replace the current net neutrality rules, if any. Pai, however, doesn't really want to do anything about the issue, as he's been quite vocal about there being no need for such regulations. In fact, he believes they hinder competition between ISPs.
It should be mentioned, however, that net neutrality means those very same ISPs must treat all Internet connections the same. That means they cannot throttle websites or applications and services that they don't like, as was the case with Netflix a few years back.
Open comments until August
The FCC will take comments on this new plan until August 16 and will make a final decision after that deadline expires.
"The Internet was not broken in 2015. We were not living in a digital dystopia. Nonetheless, the FCC that year succumbed to partisan pressure from the White House and changed course," Pai said before the vote. It is unclear what partisan pressure can be in making Internet companies treat all Internet connections in the same way, without blocking or throttling them.
Just the other week, as the FCC was taking another set of comments regarding what it should do about the rules that are already in place, the site went down. It was initially believed it was due to John Olliver's call to arms during his weekly show when he asked viewers to tell the FCC that they wanted to keep net neutrality. The FCC said, however, that it had fallen victim to a DDoS attack. It was later revealed that many of the anti-net neutrality comments were actually copy-pasted and came from people who had no recollection of ever making such comments.
"The FCC is still refusing to release proof of an alleged DDoS attack that silenced voices in support of Title II net neutrality protections, and now there is significant evidence that a person or organization has been using stolen names and addresses to fraudulently file comments opposing net neutrality,” said Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, “If this FCC has any legitimacy, it simply cannot move forward until an investigation has been conducted. We need to know who is doing this, if Ajit Pai or other FCC officials knew that it was happening, and whether any of this illegal activity has been funded by companies like Comcast and Verizon who have a long history of financing astroturf groups. State Attorneys General should immediately investigate whether people in their state were affected by this, and the FCC should immediately release any and all information that it has about who is submitting these fake comments."