Access To DataContact The FCC And Tell Them To Vote ‘No’ On December 14th
Earlier today, the FCC announced a December 14th vote on net neutrality. FCC Chairman Pai’s intent is to modify major portions of the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order. The vote to implement Chairman Pai’s proposed changes is imminent. Votes will be cast by the commission’s five commissioners, three of whom are members of the Republican party and two of whom represent the Democrats.
The i2Coalition urges FCC commissioners to vote ‘no’ on rolling back the Open Internet Order. Rolling back the Open Internet Order will not create a more competitive Internet ecosystem. Net neutrality is often viewed through the lens of the “last mile.” It is far from that. The Internet is a vastly more complex ecosystem that includes web hosts, data centers, registrars, and registries, each of whose businesses depends on net neutrality. Should the FCC roll back the Open Internet Order, these infrastructure businesses will be negatively impacted since it will diminish competition in the Internet transit space, and make last mile providers the gatekeepers between new businesses and their customers.
The Open Internet Order as currently enacted serves to ensure that the portion of the Internet ecosystem that controls the ‘last mile’ cannot reshape their services in ways that would be unfair the rest of the Internet ecosystem. The status quo prevents ‘last mile’ providers from unfairly exploiting or controlling the traffic that originates from elsewhere. These protections are at risk of going away.
“i2Coalition companies build the infrastructure of the Internet that sit above the telecommunications layer,” said i2Coalition Executive Director Christian Dawson. “This vote is being touted by some as something that will help the ecosystem of Internet businesses. Nothing can be further than the truth. This vote will negatively impact small and medium-sized Internet business, and has the potential to decrease jobs and economic growth system-wide, to the benefit of a very few large organization.”
The FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order has a broad range of support from the businesses who make up the Internet’s infrastructure. For the economic health of the Internet ecosystem moving forward, preserving the Open Internet Order is in all of our best interests.
Please use the link below to contact FCC commissioners, urging them to vote ‘no’. The voices of internet industry organizations, businesses, and individual citizens all need to be heard by the FCC.
Contact
(Available for Docketed/Rulemaking Filings Only) Comments filed through the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) can be sent as an electronic file via the Internet to ECFS. To get filing instructions for e-mail comments, commenters should send an e-mail to [email protected] and should include the following words in the body of the message, get form and your e-mail address.
i2Coalition has been partnering with Fight for the Future on Battle for the Net, to get the word out about this threat. Find out more here:
Comcast wants to control what you do online. Do you want to let them?
To win, we need to bring more members of Congress onto “Team Internet”-especially Republicans. Republican members of Congress face massive pressure from party leadership to oppose Net Neutrality, partly because of lobbying by Team Cable, and partly because they see it as “Obama era” policy.