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posted by takyon on Wednesday May 06 2015, @03:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the hands-off-my-interwebs dept.

CNSNews reports:

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member Ajit Pai said over the weekend that he foresees a future in which federal regulators will seek to regulate websites based on political content, using the power of the FCC or Federal Elections Commission (FEC). He also revealed that his opposition to "net neutrality" regulations had resulted in personal harassment and threats to his family.

Pai, one of two Republicans on the five-member FCC, has been an outspoken critic of net neutrality regulations passed by the agency on Feb. 6. The rules, which are set to take effect on June 12, reclassify Internet providers as utilities and command them not to block or "throttle" online traffic.

However, Pai said it was only the beginning. In the future, he said, "I could easily see this migrating over to the direction of content... What you're seeing now is an impulse not just to regulate the roads over which traffic goes, but the traffic itself."

"Is it unthinkable that some government agency would say the marketplace of ideas is too fraught with dissonance? That everything from the Drudge Report to Fox News... is playing unfairly in the online political speech sandbox? I don't think so," Pai said.

That in contrast to a Department of Defense article here in which the Pentagon's chief spokesman admitted, "When bad things happen, the American people should hear it from us, not as a scoop on the Drudge Report."

The Drudge Report is singled out as an example in both articles, but such changes have the potential to affect all political speech online, some people believe. As for Pai's point of view, is it valid, or is it partisan sour-grapes fearmongering?

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by captain normal on Wednesday May 06 2015, @04:33AM

    by captain normal (2205) on Wednesday May 06 2015, @04:33AM (#179388)

    Oh good... does this mean that the FCC is going to crack down on Fox, Clear Channel and Cumulus Media? Oops... he said "web sites", not broadcast media. For a second there I thought the FCC was going to shut off the political spam.

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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday May 06 2015, @04:55AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday May 06 2015, @04:55AM (#179392)

    Go read what Mark Cuban thinks the end game of net neutrality is. It is even worse that you snark. No more cable channels as such, at all. In a converged digital world, CNN on a dedicated bandwidth allocation vs cat videos on YouTube is just one lawsuit away from being illegal.

    • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday May 08 2015, @02:26AM

      by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Friday May 08 2015, @02:26AM (#180155)

      Go read what Mark Cuban thinks the end game of net neutrality is. It is even worse that you snark. No more cable channels as such, at all. In a converged digital world, CNN on a dedicated bandwidth allocation vs cat videos on YouTube is just one lawsuit away from being illegal.

      This is just more doublespeak bullshit. The reason the Republicans do not want net neutrality is because it prevents them from doing the very things they are scaremongering about now. Period. Pai is making claims in which there is simply no basis in fact, no one has claimed they are attempting to do this, indeed, this sort of thing is against the very concept of net neutrality. If net neutrality somehow gets perverted towards regulating content rather than just preventing equal access, it will again be up to the current net neutrality activists to fight against that and force it towards what it is supposed to be. I can guarantee you, they will be the only ones fighting to make it right and I would be willing to bet that the current opponents of net neutrality will be the ones behind any future perversion of it.

  • (Score: 1) by VIPERsssss on Wednesday May 06 2015, @07:08PM

    by VIPERsssss (3959) on Wednesday May 06 2015, @07:08PM (#179626)

    Are you kidding? Those so-called conservative outlets are nowhere near unhinged enough for the Useless Contrarian Party.