Wired

The need for competition and for affordable access to broadband remains. Rather than fight over net neutrality, the large internet companies and telecoms should take a cue from what happened to big financial institutions after the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Seen as the culprits for millions losing homes and retirements savings, banks were subject to draconian regulations, civil suits and hefty fines. If the public perceives that those companies are reaping disproportionate rewards at the public’s expense, it will act swiftly and punitively.

[Commentary] The internet, the mega-utility of the 21st century, officially has no regulator. In the meantime, fed up with federal apathy and sick of being held back by lousy internet access controlled by local cable monopolies, scrappy cities around the US are working hard to find ways to get cheap, world-class fiber-optic connectivity. But now there’s an additional obstacle: Powerful right-wing billionaires have joined the fight against municipal fiber efforts, using their deep pockets to fund efforts to block even the most commonsense of plans.

The Federal Communications Commissions' public comment period on its plans to repeal net neutrality protections was bombarded with bots, memes, and input from people who don't actually exist. So, with the FCC declining to investigate its own comments, we decided to undertake an analysis of our own. We confirmed six bots and 11 form letters.

Video plays a growing role in the education of students who turn to videoconferencing, streaming lectures, and other forms of high-tech distance learning to complete or extend their educations. But the looming end of net neutrality could make life harder, or at least more expensive, for such students. 

[Commentary] I was lucky enough to see up close the excitement of fired-up startup founders building things that never existed before. I got inspired enough to leave behind a great job with healthcare and put my savings into building my dream. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s short-sighted plan will crush that dream for future would-be founders.

As recently as the mid-2000s, email tracking was almost entirely unknown to the mainstream public. Then in 2006, an early tracking service called ReadNotify made waves when a lawsuit revealed that HP had used the product to trace the origins of a scandalous email that had leaked to the press. The intrusiveness (and simplicity) of the tactic came as something of a shock, even though newsletter services, salespeople, and marketers had long used email tracking to gather data.

In a letter dated Dec 7 that was handed to press but is unavailable on the Federal Communications Commission’s website, the agency refuses to assist New York Attorney General Schneiderman’s investigation into the identity theft of a million consumers in the FCC’s network neutrality record. This letter shows the FCC’s sheer contempt for public input and unreasonable failure to support integrity in its process. To put it simply, there is evidence in the FCC’s files that fraud has occurred and the FCC is telling law enforcement and victims of identity theft that it is not going to help.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai says the agency's net-neutrality rules are discouraging investment, leaving consumers with fewer, and less robust, choices for internet service, and potentially widening the digital divide. Broadband providers' own financial reports tell a different story. The nation's largest internet provider actually increased its spending during 2015 and 2016, as did several other companies. Others cut spending, but said the drops stemmed from completion of longer-term plans.

[Commentary] Did Obama really invent net neutrality? Even in a country with famously short attention spans, at least some people might have noticed that net neutrality has been around longer than that. So where did net neutrality come from? How did it get started? What’s now called the “net neutrality debate” is really a restatement of a classic question: How should a network’s owner treat the traffic that it carries? What rights, if any, should a network’s users have versus its owners?