FCC Won't Delay Vote To Repeal Net Neutrality

Rejecting requests by lawmakers and advocates, the Federal Communications Commission says it will proceed with next week's scheduled vote on whether to repeal the net neutrality rules.

On Monday, the City of New York and 40 advocacy groups urged the FCC to hold off on a vote until after a federal appellate court decides whether a different agency -- the Federal Trade Commission -- has authority to bring consumer protection cases against broadband providers.

Also on Monday, a group of 28 U.S. senators, along with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, urged publicly urged the FCC to hold off on a vote due to problems with the public commenting process.

"While I fundamentally disagree with the merits of the FCC’s proposal, what is equally concerning is the lack of integrity to the FCC’s process that has led to this point," Rosenworcel stated.

Rosenworcel, Schneiderman and the lawmakers flagged several issues, including that up to 1 million comments about the FCC's proposal may have come from bots that impersonated people, and that 50,000 complaints about net neutrality violations were omitted from the record.

"There is good reason to believe that the record may be replete with fake or fraudulent comments, suggesting that your proposal is fundamentally flawed," Sens Margaret Hassan (D-New Hampshire), Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and others write.

An FCC spokesperson said Tuesday that the agency still plans to move forward with a December 14 vote. But the FCC can always decide at the last minute to postpone a planned vote. 

The net neutrality rules, passed in 2015, classified broadband as a utility service and banned providers from blocking or throttling traffic and charging higher fees for prioritized delivery. Pai has proposed reclassifying broadband as an information service, repealing the bans on blocking, throttling and paid prioritization, and preventing states and cities from enforcing their own broadband laws.

On Tuesday, Pai reitereated his support for that plan. He said in a speech at the International Institute of Communications that his proposal would restore the "the same policy framework in the United States that governed the Internet for most of its existence -- from 1996 until 2015."

Despite that characterization, the FCC in 2010 passed rules that banned providers from blocking sites or competing applications. Those rules were in effect from 2011 until 2014, when a federal appeals court invalidated them on the grounds that broadband wasn't then classified as a common carrier service.

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