Monday 16 January 2017

Outgoing FCC chair: Don't go backward on net neutrality.

Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler is in line to have his signature accomplishments demolished by the Trump administration, so he understandably sounded a little irked in his final speech as FCC chair.

At an appearance at the Aspen Institute Friday morning in Washington, Wheeler made a case for preserving net-neutrality regulations that was rooted both in American history and in the economics of today and tomorrow.

“It now falls to the new FCC—and to those who advocate before it and the Congress—to determine the road they want to take from here,” Wheeler said. “One path leads forward, and the other leads back to re-litigating solutions that are demonstrably working.”
Neutering net neutrality

Wheeler spent most of his talk defending the net-neutrality rules that ban internet providers from blocking or slowing legal internet applications and sites, charging them for priority delivery of their bits, or otherwise using their control of connectivity to help some sites or hinder others.

The FCC’s adoption of these rules in early 2015 represented a stunning reversal of years of steadily weakening open-internet protections. Ever since, Big Telecom has been battling to undo those rules. An appeals court ruling last year upholding them seemed to end that argument—but then the election happened.



Rob Pegoraro.
Full story at Yahoo News.

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