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With days to go before his repeal of net neutrality rules, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai issued a press release about five small ISPs that he says were harmed by the rules. Pai "held a series of telephone calls with small Internet service providers across the country—from Oklahoma to Ohio, from Montana to Minnesota," his press release said.
[...] But Pai's announcement offered no data to support this assertion. So advocacy group Free Press looked at the FCC's broadband deployment data for these companies and found that four of them had expanded into new territory. The fifth didn't expand into new areas but it did start offering gigabit Internet service.
[...] According to the ISPs' ex parte filings, the only FCC staffers who participated in Pai's meetings with the ISPs were his spokespeople. The absence of staffers involved in research or policy, combined with the timing of the calls and Pai's press release, suggest that "these meetings occurred for the sake of managing public appearances rather than obtaining meaningful record evidence," Wood wrote.
Source: Ajit Pai offers no data for latest claim that net neutrality hurt small ISPs
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2017, @08:56PM (4 children)
Was the PATRIOT act patriotic? Did the CAN SPAM act actually stop spammers? We have a long history of laws that do roughly the opposite of what they claim to do. Everybody knows this, conservatives included, so support for "net neutrality" is rightly suspected of doing the opposite just due to the name.
Then there is what people are experiencing. Before net neutrality, it was easy to post conservative opinions on the net. Nothing bad would happen to you. Now, you may lose your account or have it limited in some way. It's clear that something has changed recently. For conservative users, the net has not been neutral for a very long time.
There is one obvious conclusion: net neutrality is really net anti-neutrality.
You may cry that this is a bad conclusion, and you might be right, but see it from their perspective. Both the name (given our history of naming PATRIOT and CAN SPAM) and the reality (demonetized youtube, /r/The_Donald blocked from /r/all, twitter accounts hidden...) seem to suggest that net neutrality is a rule against neutrality. For bonus credibility, those in support of net neutrality are the companies doing most of the non-neutral stuff to users, and it's an Obama-era policy. Yep, looks like an anti-conservative measure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2017, @09:07PM (2 children)
BOGGLING IN PROGRESS!
Seriously? You want to blame twitter / fb / google censorship on Net Neutrality? You shill! You moron! You traitor!
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2017, @09:17PM (1 child)
Assuming that twitter / fb / google actually want net neutrality, which isn't a given despite what they claim, they were morons. They pissed off a lot of conservative people, then fought for net neutrality. To anybody unaware of the deep internal details of how the internet works, it sure looks like net neutrality could be to blame for the censorship. At the very least, net neutrality isn't preventing that censorship, so it doesn't seem to be causing actual neutrality.
Those companies are traitors.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2017, @09:39PM
I don't like those companies, but your understanding of net neutrality if very flawed. It has nothing to do with the 1st amendment and what private networks are allowed to do. Removing Net Neutrality will not change any of that in the slightest, and will in fact make it worse.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday December 15 2017, @06:51AM
There was no PATRIOT act. There was a USA PATRIOT act.
Because eagles, and guns, and fuck yeah!
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