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WASHINGTON — The US Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines Thursday to repeal landmark 2015 rules aimed at ensuring a free and open internet, setting up a court fight over a move that could recast the digital landscape. The approval of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal marks a victory for internet service providers like AT&T Inc., Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. and hands them power over what content consumers can access. Democrats, Hollywood and companies like Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. had urged Pai, a Republican appointed by President Donald Trump, to keep the Obama-era rules...

The FCC will vote today to repeal the rules that require internet service providers to treat all data on the Internet the same. (right as of this posting they are taking a break and will be back)

The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to repeal net neutrality rules, over the objection of Democrats in Congress, Internet activists and online companies. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, and Commissioner Brendan Carr, all Republicans, supported the proposed rollback of the Obama-era rules. Democratic Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel opposed the change.

As the vote to determine the fate of Net Neutrality regulations looms in the FCC, I've been taking a harder look at where I stand on the issue. Personally, I've got vested interests as a consumer that relies on many net-connected services in my daily life. And professionally, I own an IT business that lives and dies by the availability of countless net-centric ecosystems. But every angle from which I examine the issue upon, I keep coming back to a common conclusion: Net Neutrality just isn't needed.

The Federal Communications Commission took a big step in November toward undoing the 2015 Open Internet Order and its vague, over-broad regulations by proposing the Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIFO). This order is expected to pass this week in a party-line vote. In an era of debilitating partisanship, it’s almost shocking to recall that a Republican Congress and President Clinton worked together in the ’90s to establish the permissionless regime that enabled both internet providers and large tech companies to transform our economy. The visionary agreement codified in the 1996 Telecommunications Act declared it “the policy of the United States”...

(snip) - The singular reason why this-so called “Net Neutrality” came to the forefront is because then President Barack Obama ordered it. And who was prodding Obama to do so? Google. Microsoft. Facebook. Twitter. Amazon. The Tech Left, funded largely by George Soros, had decided to champion under the banner of a benign-sounding “Net Neutrality” campaign and seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grab the moral high ground in their determination to allow the giant edge providers to censor the Internet to suit their ideological preferences — ridding the Internet of conservative and libertarian content. Google was especially vested, as the...

The perpetual outrage mob on the left has adopted an unlikely target of late – the brainy, affable head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Chairman Ajit Pai. Pai is now flanked by a Homeland Security protective detail everywhere he goes because of a deluge of specific, credible threats of violence toward him and his young children. He's also facing an onslaught of racist smears and attacks too obscene to quote – including an image asserting that Pai is Osama bin Laden after shaving his beard.Members of Congress are coming under similar attack for supporting Pai's signature proposal. The most...

The “internet poll” has become a familiar device with which to solicit reader feedback and drive engagement on topics from sports and entertainment to law and politics. But, with obvious flaws in polling methodology (e.g., random sampling, representative samples), not to mention vulnerability to fraud, the results of such polls carry little if any scientific value. They are a marketing tool only; except, it seems, when it comes to formulating federal regulations.Providing a public comment period before federal regulations can be finalized is a legal and long-standing component of federal rulemaking. Typically the window for public comments is 30 to...

FCC chair Ajit Pai tore into edge providers Tuesday (Nov. 28) in a speech in which he defended deregulating ISPs.Pai told a Future of Internet Freedom conference in Washington that edge providers like Twitter are a bigger threat to the Open Internet than internet service providers, who were targeted as the gatekeepers under his Democratic predecessor, Tom Wheeler. He says edge providers "routinely block and discriminate" and the government should not abet their efforts to dominate the internet.In a speech in which Pai defended his order to roll back Title II, he said that some Silicon Valley players have been criticizing the...

Finding a pay phone along the Pennsylvania Turnpike is no easy task, with fewer than three dozen spread over the 360-mile span, plus its extensions. Soon, it will be impossible. “Slowly, we have been eliminating the pay phones as construction work takes place at the interchanges,” said Renee Colborn, a turnpike spokeswoman. “Approximately 15 pay phones have been eliminated this year, which leaves a total of 28 pay phones at various locations.”The culprit behind the pay phone's demise along the turnpike is the same as elsewhere: the cellphone. For that same reason, turnpike officials in September began removing more than...

Regulations: When FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced plans to repeal the Obama administration's heavy-handed "net neutrality" regulations, critics acted as if the world were coming to an end. Actual consumers, however, aren't likely to notice any difference, because the "problem" those rules were supposed to solve has always been wildly exaggerated.

Net neutrality activists left signs at Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai’s house Saturday, telling his children that their father was an “evil” man who “murdered” democracy. The cardboard signs list Pai’s children by name, telling them that “you don’t have to be evil.” Pai’s leadership of the FCC has been fraught with criticism due to his rejection of net neutrality policies advocated by former President Barack Obama’s administration. The FCC announced last week that it plans to role back net neutrality rules, triggering protests outside the Pai family’s home for the second time this year.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission unveiled plans on Tuesday to repeal landmark 2015 rules that prohibited internet service providers from impeding consumer access to web content in a move that promises to recast the digital landscape. FCC chief Ajit Pai, a Republican appointed by President Donald Trump in January, said the commission will vote at a Dec. 14 meeting on his plan to rescind the so-called net neutrality rules championed by Democratic former President Barack Obama that treated internet service providers like public utilities. The rules barred broadband providers from blocking or slowing down...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday unveiled plans to repeal a landmark 2015 order that barred internet service providers from blocking or slowing down consumer access to web content, and said the regulator will prevent states and cities from adopting similar protections.

SIERRA VISTA — Unsolicited automated phone calls are a top source of complaint for the Federal Communications Commission, which is way the government agency is trying to enact new restrictions in order to protect consumers. A proposal brought forth by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai last month would allow voice service providers to block certain calls that “falsely appear” to be unable to make outgoing or taking incoming calls, according to an October FCC fact sheet. The commission estimated that U.S. consumers received more than 2.4 billion automated calls per month in 2016, many of which included a caller with a...

Donald J. Trump spoke to rural voters in a way that launched him into the presidency. His soaring rhetoric and no-nonsense promises to stand up against corruption were exactly what his constituents voted for. Say it ain’t so, but now, his own Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is pushing a rule that will hurt the very voters who put him in the White House. The swamp has overtaken the FCC and President Trump’s Make America Great Again motto is in jeopardy. Will the Trump Administration stand up to the big mobile carriers or will it cave just like every Administration...

President Trump said last week that broadcast TV licenses "must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked" in response to "partisan, distorted and fake" news coverage. But few people seem to have taken him seriously, even though complaints against broadcasters are easy to file. Publicly available data from the Federal Communications Commission show there wasn't a significant bump in consumer complaints against TV stations after a pair of Trump tweets Thursday, despite the fact that complaints are made using a simple online form or phone call.

The Hollywood Reporter unveiled that PBS and its public broadcasting brethren have written the Federal Communications Commission with a list of complaints. The headline reads, "PBS Wants the Government to Reexamine Hard Stance on Indecency." That's funny, since we haven't seen a "hard stance on indecency" since the Hays Code a half-century ago. And that wasn't even the government. Since then, liberals have successfully thwarted almost any effort to have the federal government enact broadcast decency rules, even those codified by the Supreme Court. By the time Barack Obama became president, all thoughts of regulation were abandoned. In 2012, midway...

If there’s anything good about ringless voicemails, it’s the fact that they bring people together. These voicemails that simply appear on your phone seem to invite universal hatred. Indeed, the FCC has gotten almost 2,800 complaints about ringless voicemails in June alone. Among the complaints: lost business due to spam clogging the mailbox, added data costs from checking messages, mailboxes flooded to capacity unable to receive messages from family.

The Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC), the leading conservative seniors’ organization in the country, filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Thursday over CNN’s reporting on Russian hacking. In the light of hidden camera videos from James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas showing a CNN producer calling the narrative “bulls***,” and CNN Contributor Van Jones’s characterization of the Russia “collusion” story as a “nothing burger,” AMAC has brought a complaint under FCC regulations against the knowing broadcast of false information. AMAC President Dan Weber, in a press release accompanying the filing of the complaint, said: [I]t became clear CNN...