Regulatory classification

In the eight days after news broke that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai wants to fully repeal network neutrality rules, cable and broadcast news networks -- aside from MSNBC -- have given the story very little coverage. 

A new “fact sheet” sent out by the Federal Communications Commission asks: what if facts are flexible things that we can bend to our preferred reality? It lists a series of “myths” about the commission’s proposal, followed by “facts” that supposedly debunk them — except the facts are often wrong, or directly confirm the myth that they’re trying to debunk. Here are some of the most flagrant examples.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai thinks everyone from Cher to Twitter has it wrong when they say that his efforts to roll back the US government’s existing network neutrality rules will spell the death of the web. Instead, Chairman Pai said that tech giants could pose the greatest threat by discriminating against viewpoints on the internet.

Sen Kamala Harris (D-CA) is nearing her goal of 175,000 signatures on a petition to try and stop the Federal Communications Commission from rolling back Title II and eliminating most bright-line net neutrality rules."As I said in my letter to the FCC just a few months ago: This proposal is a grave threat to the idea that the internet should be free and accessible for all. It’s a danger to our economy and free speech rights and we must defeat it," she said. 

Setting the Record Straight on Chairman Pai’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order:

MYTH: This is the end of the Internet as we know it. FACT: The Internet was free and open before the Obama Administration’s 2015 heavy-handed Title II Internet regulations, and it will be free and open after they are repealed.

Sen Mark Warner (D-VA) released the following statement on the Federal Communications Commission's plan to repeal net neutrality rules: "The FCC Chairman has decided to move forward to repeal net neutrality rules without any plan in place to uphold longstanding open internet principles supported by both Democratic and Republican Administrations.

I used natural language processing techniques to analyze network neutrality comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing. NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions.

“Gathering and analyzing comments from the public is an important part of the Federal Communications Commission’s rulemaking process,” the American agency says on its website. But analyzing those comments increasingly means reading the thoughts of spambots. Automated comments are now part of political reality: During 2016’s US presidential race, a large proportion of tweets supporting both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton came from automated accounts. These bots send messages en masse, originating from one source and usually conveying a particular ideology. Some are easy to spot.

[Commentary] In 2015 the Federal Communications Commission under then-President Obama launched Network Neutrality putting broadband under the same Title II regulatory framework as telephone companies a century earlier. In an open letter that year President Obama wrote; “Today’s FCC decision will protect innovation and create a level playing field for the next generation of entrepreneurs…” The word innovation doesn’t often come to mind when you’re talking about a regulated utility which is just what the government wanted to achieve with the FCC decision.

Backers of a new plan to upend “net neutrality” policies tout the proposal as a free market approach to internet oversight—one that will encourage an abundance of web content delivery, innovation, and investment, with no more government regulation than is necessary. But some school officials and education organizations are deeply skeptical that the plan will protect educators’ access to online sources, or nurture innovation by K-12 entrepreneurs.  In K-12 circles, two of the biggest worries about Pai’s proposal boil down to the following: