Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote to kill net neutrality under the guise of “Restoring Internet Freedom.” The FCC’s net neutrality rules that currently regulate Internet service providers (ISPs) as Title II common carriers forbids them from participating in many types of customer harming practices such as throttling or prioritizing certain types of internet traffic over others. Simply put, net neutrality protects consumers from predatory practices by large corporations, an acceptable use of government regulation that has proven useful in regulating other public utilities, such as water and electricity.
Support for net neutrality is at an all time high
One FCC commissioner, Mignon Clyburn, has even come out in favor of net neutrality. She stated:
“Net neutrality is doomed if we are silent.”
Senate Democrats have also voiced their support of net neutrality in an open letter released on TechCrunch. The letter started simply:
“The free and open internet as we know it is at risk.”
Additionally, several groups of startups, tech companies, and non profits such as Fight For The Future and even a late show have also made the stand, helping guide real users to the FCC’s comment page so that they can leave comments. So many comments that the FCC even claimed to be DDOS’d.
Even with the anti-net neutrality bot spam, the majority of comments to the FCC are for net neutrality
The upcoming FCC vote has garnered a lot of attention. The official comment period has seen hundreds of thousands of submissions, with evidence that a good portion of them were submitted by bots. According to data analysis by Jeffrey Fossett, even once you account for the most commonly submitted anti net neutrality comments, the majority of comments to the FCC are still for net neutrality. Just like in previous iterations where the netizens of the world assembled to make their voice heard – we are doing so again.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/05/today-fcc-votes-fate-net-neutrality/
