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Why? He graduated from two elite universities and spent most of his career serving in the government, including with the antitrust division of the DOJ. His confirmation to the FCC was bipartisan and he had the support of Obama despite his affiliation with the Republican Party. But because back in 2001 he spent about two years out of his twenty year career as a legal adviser to Verizon, he gets ripped as a corporate stooge. It's just an extension of hysterical antagonism toward corporations, as if touching the private sector in your field of legal expertise makes you permanently tainted and contractually bound to advance their interests.

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Ajit Pai is just a scapegoat figure to shift blame to, the shadowy hands from the boardroom in the back are the true masterminds. What concerns me is the excessive lobbying that should not be allowed in the first place. Democratic process should serve the people and the country first, not the corporate interests and self-gain; otherwise it is just a pirates democracy driven by profit and greed.

I still don't understand how giving the Federal Trade Commission authority to monitor internet companies is such a bad thing. This is the organization whose designed to fight monopolies, price fixing, cartel practices such as oligarchy structures, and kinda run the anti-trust laws that so many people want enforced for the internet.

For a bunch of people who don't want monopolies and corporate greed to rule, you certainly want the internet run by a giant monopoly of unfeeling beuracrates. What exactly has been done since 2015 to stop corporations from ruining the internet? What has the FCC actually done to Foster competition, stop monopolies, or make the internet better in any way? I know one thing, Facebook and Google seemed to get a hell of a lot worse with their customer service when they fcc made them utilities.

Yes, personally I think lobbying should be illegal

From what I can see, it's far worse.
You can bitch and moan about corporations doing shitty things – but those things often time have a lot of consequences, and tend to work out. Not only that, the perpetual market pressures of competition force innovation, which turning the internet into a utility will simply not do.

Lobbying itself isn't wrong. It's just lobbying in unchecked amounts. If not for lobbying most of the social programs in the US wouldn't exist.

But not all lobbying is the same. There are, for example, environmentalist groups lobbying for Government legislators to change laws in their favor, or allocate more resources to their goals.
There are also industry lobbies that vie to do the opposite, by suggesting laws and regulations that would help them.

I don't think we can escape the trappings of lobbying. I think instead we should be aware of it's power, and how we can help and assist the ones that we favor.

@Black Graphic T & @Chewbunny

I'm aware there are some groups use lobbying for good but the damage done by groups lobbying for self interest (which is basically control of the government) is too great and lobbying in principle is kinda undemocratic, as it makes the elected officals listen to a small focus group over the people who they are supposed to be representing

If you have a suggested law that would get rid of abused lobbying while keeping good lobbying that can somehow avoid get a loophole written into it by the bad lobbyers before it's passed then I'm all ears

NO! said:

Isn’t anyone worried about the excessive lobbying in america though?

Lobbying's been a problem for decades, but net neutrality really has little to do with it. Lobbying by telecom companies is at the lowest it's been in over a decade. ISPs haven't really lobbied over net neutrality and aren't terribly involved in all this. That's because there's nothing really at stack for them. Their main business model (charging consumers for access to internet services) remains unchanged whether net neutrality passes or not, so why bother dumping money in a fight they have no horse in?

People like to go to the fast lane and cable channel analogy to show ISPs' plans, but no one can seem to actually show an ISP that's planning to do any of that. Because that's not the plan. The plan is data usage limits. (Even the one in Portugal.) Capping the amount of bandwidth customers can use and charging them a fee for when they use more than their allotted amount. Net neutrality has nay a peep about that and that's why they don't really care.

Every single major ISP has such a scheme currently in place and they're trying to leverage it. AT&T has you bundle DirectTV and internet to "wave" the cap and allow unlimited bandwidth, many cell carriers allow data exemptions for certain sites (like Youtube) to incentivize people to sign up, etc. That's why AT&T wants Time Warner: so they can tell their cell customers "we'll let you watch WB movies and shows without it impacting your data limits."

Everyone's raging about net neutrality and the ISPs are all laughing. They have their business model locked down for decades to come and, at best, they won't have to worry about the FCC getting uppity if they throttle and at worst, the internet can declare a major victory over the big bad telecom corporations while they continue to roll wheelbarrows full of money into their bank accounts and carry on business as usual like they have since the 90s.

Clownfish said:

…the shadowy hands from the boardroom in the back are the true masterminds

Care to provide a citation for this? Or has the net neutrality debate shifted right over into wild conspiracy theories and the Internet Industrial Complex doing vague, unsubstantiated scary things?

If they have such a problem with consumers using up a fuckton of bandwidth, then they should upgrade their services to support huge bandwidth usage. They have the money to do it, there's nothing stopping them.

Any corporation could minimize the costs of their products or maximize their products' value for the same price, effectively becoming non-profits. But there's no reason for them to, and no reason for the consumer to want that to be the case: maybe you'll be able to get your cars cheaper for a while, but everyone will be driving the same model of car for decades because there will be no incentive to innovate.

The best way to get internet access more cheaply while still encouraging innovation is to both encourage more investment into the industry and treat big ISPs as an antitrust issue so that there is nationwide competition for consumers. If this is your biggest priority then net neutrality won't do anything for you, so it's the wrong horse to back.

KaijuSundae|Calkarot said:

If they have such a problem with consumers using up a fuckton of bandwidth, then they should upgrade their services to support huge bandwidth usage.

They don't have any problems with people using a ton of bandwidth: that's their entire business model. They want you to use as much bandwidth as possible. The more bandwidth someone uses, the more money they make. I'm sure ISPs would love to give everyone blazing fast internet, then charge for going over 100GB per month, but installing fiber optics can be really expensive (depending on the area).+ and the actual market for it just doesn't seem to be there just yet (see: Google winding down Google Fiber). Similar issues abound for mobile networks.

Can't we at least TRY to change things then? Why most everything be in permanent static stagnation?

Alabama Senate candidate Doug Jones has announced his support for Net Neutrality.

The question isn't should we try to change things, the question is how do we want to change it. Do we want to use consumer power and market fores? Or do we want to put our faith into the hands of government bureaucrats to craft some sort of a law (with heavy input from relevant lobbying groups)?

If the change you make makes something worse is worth the change? I don't think so. If you fear static stagnation then asking the government to turn it into a Utility is the opposite solution you're looking for.

@Chewybunny I see your point but it is not just economic change, it is potentially fighting against censorship:

(Sorry to post a picture you probably already seen I just think it is a good argument)

@NO!
AOL said it was a software glitch. That may or may not be true, but what is true is that users sending the emails did get an error message when they tried to send them. That's how they found out it was happening.

Telus isn't a US company. They stated they cut access due to threats the site was making against them and posting pictures of employees who crossed picket lines. Far from being a secret or hidden thing, they were quite open and honest about blocking the site. I also find it highly unlikely people received HTML error codes (404, 503, etc.) since those originate from the website's server, not the ISP. An ISP block would look like something like this:

Sadly, given how long ago it happened, I can't find anything about what the actual block looked like.

It's also kind of funny that the only two examples someone can provide about the evil ISPs are from over a decade ago, one involving a company that wouldn't even be subject to our net neutrality laws who was in a bitter labor dispute that was completely honest about what was going on, and the other a block/glitch over some email thing no one even remembers that lasted for a few hours before it was corrected.

What a terrifying dystopia.

Fair enough, but I was talking more about of the speculative scenario instead of the examples. We HAVE seen twitter and other webpages censoring users, who is to say internet companies won't do the same to a more insidious degree? Normally capitalist forces would stop that, but you know… monopoly of questionable legality.

Ajit Pai jokes about being Verizon's 'puppet' in leaked video.

"jokes"

such a shame what people have come to, literally destroying the internet for a day just so they can prove what

also this is my resignation so consider me permanently retired so boom you lost another oldfag on kym

counter point:

packages that would cause people to have to pay to get on social media…or leave…

may actually be good for society.

I sent in my letter to Congress but let me just say that I am still pretty scared right now my dudes.
I can barely pay rent, I can't shelve out more money to be able to use the websites I use regularly and still have enough income to buy food.
and i can't sacrifice my internet either that would be like cutting off both my legs and my pinky finger

The vote is happening.

They are currently on item two of their agenda for today. Item four, restoring internet freedom, is the NN vote.

We lost.

For now! TIME FOR ROUND 2!