Techdirt's Comments To The FCC On Net Neutrality And Preserving An Open Internet
Techdirt's Comments To The FCC On Net Neutrality And Preserving An Open Internet
from the speak-up dept
by Mike Masnick
While the FCC has thankfully extended its deadline for filing comments on the net neutrality issue through Friday after its site melted down (again), I also wanted to share with you exactly what it is that we're submitting to the FCC. In short: we support reclassification under Title II in combination with clear forbearance, to limit the regulatory power of the FCC to just the specific issues dealing with keeping the internet free and open for competition. We note how important this has been to us on a variety of levels. For example, as a small company, we've been able to effectively compete against much larger news organizations. That would be much more difficult when those organizations could negotiate and pay to be on "fast lanes" while smaller operations like ourselves would be unable to do so.
Furthermore, we note the harm that this would cause to free speech. Given that we are frequent critics of the major broadband players, it's likely that even if we were able to afford to pay for "priority access," those companies would make it difficult for us to actually do so, using some sort of pretense to limit the ability of vocal critics to get access to the "fast" internet.
In addition, we urge the FCC not to ignore the interconnection issue, by which broadband access players have "shifted" the debate away from the last mile, but have effectively achieved the same result: getting big internet companies to pay double for the bandwidth consumers already thought they were paying for. Beyond that, though, we hope that the FCC will actually do what it's been promising for the better part of a decade and encourage actual competition in a variety of ways: knocking down barriers to entry, increasing (vastly) the amount of spectrum available and exploring possibilities to encourage competition at the service level, rather than just at the network level. You can read our entire comment below. While some friends in Washington DC have promised to deliver our comments by hand today, we'll keep trying the electronic way as well. Hopefully we'll get them delivered by the end of the week.
PS: If you like our reporting on net neutrality issues, please consider supporting our crowdfunding campaign, which will allow us to put even more resources towards reporting on this key issue.
Document Text at:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140715/11302427880/techdirts-comments-to-fcc-net-neutrality-preserving-open-internet.shtml