Campaign Action
The Federal Communications Commission has refused a request to extend the deadline for filing public comments on its plan to overturn net neutrality rules, and on top of that, are refusing to release 40,000 complaints they've received about violations of net neutrality from citizens. Because if they hide the evidence that yes, the telecoms happily violate net neutrality, then they can continue to argue it's not necessary.
The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request in May of this year for tens of thousands of net neutrality complaints that Internet users filed against their ISPs. The NHMC argues that the details of these complaints are crucial for analyzing FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to overturn net neutrality rules. The coalition also asked the FCC to extend the initial comment deadline until 60 days after the commission fully complies with the FoIA request. A deadline extension would have given people more time to file public comments on the plan to eliminate net neutrality rules.
Instead, the FCC [Monday] denied the motion for an extension and said that it will only provide the text for a fraction of the complaints, because providing them all would be too burdensome. Pai has previously claimed that his proposed repeal of net neutrality rules is using a "far more transparent" process than the one used to implement net neutrality rules in 2015. Pai has also claimed that net neutrality rules were a response to "hypothetical harms and hysterical prophecies of doom" and that there was no real problem to solve. […]
The NHMC believes that consumers' net neutrality complaints might contradict Pai's claims that there are no real problems addressed by net neutrality rules. The NHMC says the FCC "must produce the approximately 47,000 open Internet complaints that it has received [since June 2015] and documents related to the open Internet ombudsperson's interactions with Internet users."
The NHMC adds that the FCC “has already failed to meet the FOIA deadline, and FCC FOIA officers have offered several inconsistent timelines for document production, ranging from six months to two years.” So much for all his promises of “transparency.”
FCC chairman Ajit Pai doesn't want to hear it, and he doesn't want to provide any transparency, or any information at all that will inform a decision about what to do moving forward on net neutrality. Because Pai has already made up his mind—he intends to end it.
