The FCC wants to change the way net neutrality works

Apr 20, 2017 21:31 GMT  ·  By

The tech industry is quite adamant that net neutrality protections must be kept in place, so a meeting between FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and executives from a number of tech giants, including Facebook Oracle and Intel, was held this week. 

Pai is a known opposer of Title II and has been ever since he was just a member of the FCC board and not the Chairman. Following Thursday's meeting, Pai has stressed that he's been consistent in his views, that he favors free and open Internet and strongly opposes Title II. This is the portion of the law that the former Chairman used in order to make companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to heel to the FCC.

"Outside of the context of any pending proceeding, I've been simply soliciting thoughts on how to secure the online consumer protections that people have talked about," Pai said, Recode reports.

Since he opposes Net Neutrality as it is known at this moment, Pai has been playing around with different alternatives. One idea he came up with is to encourage companies to commit voluntarily that they will not block or slow down web traffic for competitors' services. This would also move the power to enforce net neutrality rules to the Federal Trade Commission.

Some are happy, some are angry

While the telco industry has been quite receptive to Pai's ideas, probably rejoicing that net neutrality will likely die while having a laugh about the idea of "voluntarily committing" to keeping up with the rules without having a proper watchdog, the tech industry is not feeling the cheer.

In fact, many companies have expressed concern over Pai's ideas. Google, Facebook, Twitter are some of the companies that have spoken out about the issues they had with the FCC's plans. "The Internet industry is uniform in its belief that net neutrality preserves the consumer experience, competition, and innovation online. In other words, existing net neutrality rules should be enforced and kept intact," read a letter sent by the Internet Association recently.