FCC Flooded With Net-Neutrality Comments

The Federal Communications Commission has received a record-breaking 3 million Net neutrality comments as of Monday afternoon.

That unexpectedly high figure shows the importance of the “relatively obscure” issue, Columbia law professor and Net neutrality advocate Tim Wu said Monday at a rally in downtown Manhattan.

“The frontier today is the Internet, and we don't want to have it closed,” Wu told the crowd of around 125 Net neutrality supporters.

The number of comments generated by the issue far surpasses the previous record of 1.4 million, which came in the wake of the 2004 Super Bowl, when Justin Timberlake briefly exposed Janet Jackson's breast.

Wu -- who coined the phrase “Net neutrality” in a 2003 academic paper -- theorized that the issue has spurred so much interest because people view Net neutrality as an essential component of equality. He said the concept of Net neutrality reflects the idea that “when you go online and speak your piece, you have as much right to be heard” as big corporations.

Monday's rally in New York, which was organized by advocacy group Free Press, came on the last day to submit comments to the FCC about its controversial plan to allow broadband providers to create online fast lanes for companies willing to pay higher fees.

Organizations like Free Press, the Writers Guild of America-West and numerous other Net neutrality advocates want the FCC to abandon that idea and instead reclassify broadband as a public utility. Doing so would allow the FCC to impose the same types of common carrier regulations that require telephone companies to put through all phone calls.

The Writers Guild-West says in its comments that the FCC's current proposal “will enhance the power of Internet service providers, which operate in a market that features little competition and high switching costs ... and will allow ISPs, not consumers, to decide what content is available.”

On the other hand, cable companies and telecoms oppose reclassification, as do organizations like the libertarian group Tech Freedom. “Attempting to retrofit the onerous set of regulations developed for the monopoly telephony network onto the Internet would be a disaster for Internet users everywhere,” TechFreedom and a coalition of other organizations said in a letter sent to the FCC on Monday.

The organizations add that reclassifying broadband as a utility would subject providers to “a slew of burdensome regulations, from price controls to tariffs and listings of prices, which economists have long known facilitate collusion among regulated companies and make markets less competitive.”

 

 

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