is a news writer covering all things consumer tech. Stevie started out at Laptop Mag writing news and reviews on hardware, gaming, and AI.
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The fight for net neutrality never seems to be truly won or lost.
Federal net neutrality rules have been on and off for the past 15 years. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed the Open Internet Order under President Barack Obama in 2010, prohibiting ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful internet traffic, the baseline rule of net neutrality. Then, at the request of those ISPs, a court blocked its rules. An updated framework was passed by the FCC in 2015, only to be overturned in 2017 under President Donald Trump’s first administration. It seemed poised for a comeback in 2024, but the victory lasted mere months before a court overturned it — kicking off a rough year for the open internet and broadband regulation as a whole.
Rather than fight the court’s ruling against net neutrality, the Trump administration’s FCC has preemptively removed the rules — without a chance for public comment. The move was part of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative, which aims to wipe out “unnecessary” regulations.
ISPs have long described net neutrality rules as onerous. For instance, USTelecom president and CEO Jonathan Spalter claimed the 2024 vote to reinstate the FCC’s net neutrality rules was a “counterproductive, unnecessary, and anti-consumer regulatory distraction.”
However, Matt Wood, vice president of policy and general counsel at the nonprofit Free Press, says in an interview with The Verge that ISPs often feel little financial impact from these rules, and may even already be complying with them. “A lot of cable and phone companies, when they talk to their business people and then go back to investors and to the financial analysts, they’re saying, ‘Yep, this is how we’re doing it anyway.’ So, I think a lot of their complaints about the supposed ‘burdens’ from these rules are really just ideological in nature.”
“A lot of their complaints about the supposed ‘burdens’ from these rules are really just ideological in nature.” — Matt Wood, Free Press
Why bother with regulations if ISPs are already (theoretically) compliant? It comes down to accountability and transparency. Regulations ensure voters, not ISPs, are setting the rules of the road online — otherwise, there’s nothing to stop them from changing their operations down the line.
The FCC’s anti-regulatory agenda for telecoms reaches even further than net neutrality. Chao Jun Liu, senior legislative associate at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), notes the FCC’s recent move to reverse Biden-era telecom cybersecurity rules. Carr’s FCC also rolled back requirements for them to provide “nutrition labels” for their broadband pricing, claiming it was “burdensome” for ISPs to display those details.
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