FCC Proves Yet Again That It’s Out To Kill Net Neutrality

Art Brodsky | Wired | May 15, 2014

Well, that meeting of the Federal Communications Commission earlier today was certainly a lot of sound and fury signifying next to nothing.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, despite weeks of backlash, still wants to allow Internet Service Providers like Comcast and Verizon to “offer” different levels of service to internet companies, although he refused to call them a “fast lane” and a “slow lane” and refused to recognize how those arrangements up the food chain affect consumers and a neutral internet.

He is refusing to recognize reality. His concession to those of us who value a neutral internet is to allow it on a case-by-case basis, guaranteeing that nothing will ever get settled, and internet companies will be allowed to bleed money.

The other commissioners weren’t exactly profiles in courage. The Republicans, Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly, both former GOP Hill staffers, kept to the orthodoxy prescribed by Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. Rather than take the side of the many businesses that do business on the web, they favored the few, although in various disguises. Pai said the FCC should defer to Congress, forgetting that once upon a time Congress created the FCC to regulate “communication by wire and radio.” O’Rielly warned about “monopoly-era rules,” forgetting that in many places real broadband is a monopoly...