Wired

[Commentary] I was lucky enough to see up close the excitement of fired-up startup founders building things that never existed before. I got inspired enough to leave behind a great job with healthcare and put my savings into building my dream. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s short-sighted plan will crush that dream for future would-be founders.

As recently as the mid-2000s, email tracking was almost entirely unknown to the mainstream public. Then in 2006, an early tracking service called ReadNotify made waves when a lawsuit revealed that HP had used the product to trace the origins of a scandalous email that had leaked to the press. The intrusiveness (and simplicity) of the tactic came as something of a shock, even though newsletter services, salespeople, and marketers had long used email tracking to gather data.

In a letter dated Dec 7 that was handed to press but is unavailable on the Federal Communications Commission’s website, the agency refuses to assist New York Attorney General Schneiderman’s investigation into the identity theft of a million consumers in the FCC’s network neutrality record. This letter shows the FCC’s sheer contempt for public input and unreasonable failure to support integrity in its process. To put it simply, there is evidence in the FCC’s files that fraud has occurred and the FCC is telling law enforcement and victims of identity theft that it is not going to help.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai says the agency's net-neutrality rules are discouraging investment, leaving consumers with fewer, and less robust, choices for internet service, and potentially widening the digital divide. Broadband providers' own financial reports tell a different story. The nation's largest internet provider actually increased its spending during 2015 and 2016, as did several other companies. Others cut spending, but said the drops stemmed from completion of longer-term plans.

[Commentary] Did Obama really invent net neutrality? Even in a country with famously short attention spans, at least some people might have noticed that net neutrality has been around longer than that. So where did net neutrality come from? How did it get started? What’s now called the “net neutrality debate” is really a restatement of a classic question: How should a network’s owner treat the traffic that it carries? What rights, if any, should a network’s users have versus its owners?

Voters know Republicans in Congress are the only ones who can stop Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai.  If enough Republicans tell Chairman Pai to stop, he will likely back down. After all, Congressional pressure has stopped the FCC before. Members of Congress face a choice: They can side with their constituents, who overwhelmingly want them to defend the greatest communication and innovation platform ever invented, or support one of the most blatant anti-consumer corporate giveaways in modern history.

First, the Department of Justice sued to block AT&T's proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The next day, the Federal Communications Commission unveiled a proposal to loosen the limits on the number of television and radio stations a broadcast company can own, the latest in a series of moves that pave the way for Sinclair Broadcasting's proposed $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Company. The same week, the FCC unveiled its plan to overturn net-neutrality rules that ban broadband providers, including AT&T, from blocking or discriminating against legal content.

In a recent article, respected technology industry analyst and blogger Ben Thompson argued that he supports net neutrality, but thinks the Federal Communications Commission is right to repeal rules that ban broadband providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking, slowing down, or otherwise discriminating against legal content. Thompson argues that designating broadband providers as common carriers is a "heavy-handed” way to enforce net neutrality, echoing industry voices, and FCC chair Ajit Pai.