Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
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: 2) by urza9814 on Friday December 15 2017, @04:49PM
The funny thing is, this will likely get *worse* without NN, rather than better.
The problem is the conservatives are getting exactly what they want -- rule by the almighty dollar. The free market has spoken, and people apparently *want* mass censorship by private corporations. They voted with their wallets, right? They vote for YouTube and Facebook and all that shit every single goddamn time they log on.
With NN, they can change their minds and go elsewhere any time they want. Without it, that can become very expensive or entirely impossible to do.
This would be hysterical if it wasn't so frightening...
That's because the end-user doesn't understand the difference between the transport network and the endpoints...
Only as long as we allow the slow and unlawful repeal of the First Amendment to continue. By law, the FCC cannot censor. The same cannot be said of network service or content providers.