The FCC’s Order Is Out, We’ve Read It, and Here’s What You Need to Know: It Will End Net Neutrality and Break the Internet
On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai released his draft order to completely eradicate Net Neutrality.
You can read the full text here. The short version is that Pai’s order takes the Net Neutrality rules off the books and abandons the court-approved Title II legal framework that served as the basis for the successful 2015 Open Internet Order.
The FCC is scheduled to vote on this dangerous proposal at its meeting on Dec. 14.
Pai’s draft is a lot of things: thin on substance and reasoning, cruel, willfully naive — and it’s everything that ISPs like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon could have wanted (and more). But what it’s not is sensible or grounded in reality. It will take away every safeguard we need to protect the open internet we’ve always had, giving ISPs the power to kill off their competition, choke innovation, charge more for different kinds of content, suppress political dissent, and marginalize the voices of racial-justice advocates and others organizing for change.
We’ve had just a few hours to read this dud, launched by the FCC the day before Thanksgiving. Here are a few of the many lowlights in the draft order and a quick explanation of why they’re wrong.
While we’ll have more analysis in the days to come, this is our first take. And if no one puts a stop to Pai’s plans — with more than 200,000 rightly outraged internet users calling lawmakers and urging them to do just that on Tuesday alone — we’ll have even more to say on this when we take the FCC to court.
Breaking the Rules
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