The Republican controlled FCC, under chairman Ajit Pai has been beating the drum since forever that net neutrality protections need to be destroyed because not only are they bad for investments in our broadband marketplace (a lie), they don’t even serve a purpose because nobody has to worry about net neutrality violations anyways. The latter point of view is only easy to defend if you hide all evidence to the contrary which is exactly what Ajit Pai and his telecom cronies have been trying to do. The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) has been requesting the FCC to turn over the many complaints that have been logged over the past two years since net neutrality protections went into effect. These are complaints from consumers against big telecoms who are violating those protections. Democrat FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn wonders aloud why after months and months, Pai has not been “transparent” with tens of thousands of complaints.
As NHMC diplomatically explains in their handy fact sheet, the FCC is running a puppet show of BS.
Through its FOIA request, NHMC uncovered over 47,000 Open Internet consumer complaints and 18,000 carrier responses received by the Commission since June 2015. NHMC also discovered 1,500 emails documenting ombudsperson assistance to consumers. These numbers alone expose a major flaw in the FCC’s NPRM — the FCC failed to conduct any sort of analysis on evidence held within its exclusive possession.
Further, the FCC structured questions in the NPRM as if this evidence did not exist. It asked if there was “evidence of actual harm to consumers sufficient to support maintaining the Title II telecommunications service classification” and proposed to eliminate the ombudsperson role because, “consumers are comfortable working with the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, and typically did not call on the ombudsperson specifically.” The FCC failed to disclose the critical evidence uncovered by NHMC, exposing disregard for the truth and willingness to hide evidence of consumer harms remedied by Title II rules.
The vote on destroying the open internet that is planned for next week is one of the multi-pronged attacks on the freedom of information, and by extension our freedom of speech and the freedom of the press.
