This is the Year Donald Trump Kills Net Neutrality
This is the Year Donald Trump Kills Net Neutrality
Klint Finley
Wired
Over the past two years, the FCC has passed new regulations to protect net neutrality by banning so-called “slow lanes” on the internet, created new rules to protect internet subscriber privacy, and levied record fines against companies like AT&T and Comcast. But this more aggressive FCC has never sat well with Republican lawmakers.
Soon, these lawmakers may not only repeal the FCC’s recent decisions, but effectively neuter the agency as well. And even if the FCC does survive with its authority intact, experts warn, it could end up serving a darker purpose under President-elect Donald Trump.
Some have held out hope that Trump end up being more friendly to net neutrality once in office, despite a tweet in 2014 claiming that net neutrality would somehow be used to target conservative media (a claim that makes no sense), based largely on the Trump’s opposition to the AT&T and Time-Warner merger during his campaign. But there’s little reason to think net neutrality will survive under Trump. His transition team is just as united against net neutrality as their predecessors were for it. Congressional Republicans have been working to kill the FCC’s net neutrality rules since before the FCC voted on them. The two Republican FCC commissioners have already vowed to overturn the FCC’s current net neutrality rules and other regulations. So you don’t need to read tea leaves to predict that the FCC’s net neutrality rules are not long for this world.
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