Last October, the Federal Communications Commission won its first major legal battle over its 2018 repeal of the federal net neutrality rules that guaranteed equal access to the internet for all content and data providers. In a lawsuit brought by the Mozilla Foundation and several states, the Washington, D.C., federal appeals court ruled that the FCC had the right to roll back the regulations.
But the ruling was not as clear cut as it appeared on first inspection. Not only did the court strike down the FCC’s “preemption clause,” which prohibited states from putting their own net neutrality rules in place. As a result, several states including New York and Washington are now moving ahead with their own net neutrality legislation.
The court’s ruling also pointed the finger at several flaws in the net neutrality repeal, which the FCC has christened with the Orwellian title, the Restoring Internet Freedom order. One of those flaws: the FCC did not adequately consider, the court said, how rolling back net neutrality rules could affect public safety.
In other words, if internet service providers choose to favor sites that pay premium fees, public safety agencies that need to communicate quickly and efficiently with the public could find themselves slowed down or shut out.
As a result, the FCC is now calling for a new set of public comments, via its official website at this link.
But when the FCC first solicited comments in the run-up to its 2017 vote on repealing net neutrality rules, the site was flooded with fakes—phony comments from dummy accounts, or accounts from actual people whose online identities were stolen.
About 500,000 of the estimated 2 million phony comments originated from email addresses in Russia, FCC Chair Ajit Pai later admitted.
Another 1.5 million bogus comments, according to an investigative report, were generated by a single, Republican political consultant who worked for a major, broadband industry lobbying organization.
Nonetheless, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat who voted against the net neutrality repeal in 2017, encouraged the public to submit comments in response to the FCC’s new invitation.
“The American public should raise their voices and let Washington know how important an open internet is for every piece of our civic and commercial lives,” Rosenworcel said in a statement. “The agency wrongfully gave broadband providers the power to block websites, throttle services, and censor online content [which the court did not say was on the wrong side of the law] The fight for an open internet is not over. It’s time to make noise.”
Photo by Camilo Sanchez / Wikimedia Commons
