Jon Brodkin

Comcast met with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's staff the week of Oct 30 in an attempt to prevent states from issuing network neutrality rules.

AT&T is reportedly abandoning its attempt to stop a Louisville (KY) ordinance that helped draw Google Fiber into the city. In February 2016, AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky to stop an ordinance that gives Google Fiber and other ISPs faster access to utility poles.

Verizon has asked the Federal Communications Commission to preempt any state laws that regulate network neutrality and broadband privacy. It is possible that state governments might impose their own rules to protect consumers in their states.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai wants to impose a budget cap on the Lifeline program that helps poor people buy broadband and phone service.

On May 8, when the Federal Communications Commission website failed and many people were prevented from submitting comments about network neutrality, the cause seemed obvious. Comedian John Oliver had just aired a segment blasting FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to gut net neutrality rules, and it appeared that the site just couldn't handle the sudden influx of comments. But when the FCC released a statement explaining the website's downtime, the commission didn't mention the Oliver show or people submitting comments opposing Pai's plan. Instead, the FCC attributed the downtime solely to "multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS)." These were "deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host," performed by "actors" who "were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather, they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC." The FCC has faced skepticism from net neutrality activists who doubt the website was hit with multiple DDoS attacks at the same time that many new commenters were trying to protest the plan to eliminate the current net neutrality rules. According to FCC CIO David Bray, FCC staff noticed high comment volumes around 3:00 AM the morning of Monday, May 8. As the FCC analyzed the log files, it became clear that non-human bots created these comments automatically by making calls to the FCC's API. Interestingly, the attack did not come from a botnet of infected computers but was fully cloud-based. By using commercial cloud services to make massive API requests, the bots consumed available machine resources, which crowded out human commenters. In effect, the bot swarm created a distributed denial-of-service attack on FCC systems using the public API as a vehicle. It's similar to the distributed denial of service attack on Pokemon Go in July 2016.

One of the most immediate changes with the Chairman Ajit Pai Federal Communications Commission was that the FCC leadership now fully supports zero-rating, the practice in which Internet service providers exempt some websites and online services from data caps, often in exchange for payment from the websites. Zero-rating is controversial in the US and abroad, with many consumer advocates and regulators saying it violates the net neutrality principle that all online content should be treated equally by network providers. But some zero-rating proponents believe it can serve a noble purpose—bringing Internet access to poor people who otherwise would not be online.

That's the view of Roslyn Layton, who served on Presidnet Trump's FCC transition team, does telecommunication research at Aalborg University in Denmark, and works as a visiting fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Layton believes that zero-rating should be used to get poor people on the Internet in the US, similar to the "Free Basics" program that Facebook has implemented with mobile carriers in developing countries.

Widespread support for strong network neutrality rules continues, both from individuals who use the Internet and companies that offer websites and applications over the Internet. But Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has made a point of trumpeting anti-net neutrality sentiment as the FCC begins the process of reclassifying Internet service providers and eliminating net neutrality rules. The sentiment in favor of net neutrality from individuals and website operators is a repeat from 2014, when most of the 4 million public comments supported strong net neutrality rules. In that case, a Democratic-led commission decided to strengthen its initial proposal and reclassify ISPs while outlawing blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization in 2015.

Cities and towns in Maine that want to provide their own broadband service just helped defeat a proposed law that would have made it impossible to build taxpayer-funded networks.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Nate Wadsworth, a Hiram Republican, would have imposed stringent conditions that critics say would make it all but impossible for Maine towns and cities to build their own high-speed networks when cable and telephone companies decline to provide upgraded service. Municipal officials and one ISP that has partnered with a city for a municipal project objected to the bill in a hearing. The next day, a legislative technology committee voted 12-0 against the bill, effectively killing it.

SpaceX said its planned constellation of 4,425 broadband satellites will launch from the Falcon 9 rocket beginning in 2019 and continue launching in phases until reaching full capacity in 2024. SpaceX gave the Senate Commerce Committee an update on its satellite plans during a broadband infrastructure hearing. Satellite Internet access traditionally suffers from high latency, relatively slow speeds, and strict data caps. But as we reported in November, SpaceX says it intends to solve these problems with custom-designed satellites launched into low-Earth orbits.

No major Internet service provider has done more to prevent implementation of network neutrality rules in the US than Verizon. After years of fighting the rules in courts of law and public opinion, Verizon is about to get what it wants as the Federal Communications Commission—now led by a former Verizon lawyer—prepares to eliminate the rules and the legal authority that allows them to be enforced.

But Verizon's general counsel, Craig Silliman, wants you to believe that Verizon never opposed net neutrality rules, even though it sued the FCC to eliminate them. He's also making the claim that the FCC isn't even talking about eliminating the net neutrality rules, even though FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to do exactly that.