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The Federal Communications Commission under Donald Trump and Chairman Ajit Pai is determined to end net neutrality, and will stop at pretty much nothing to make that happen. That includes essentially burying the evidence that an open internet is vitally important to the nation.
The Federal Communications Commission last week released more than 13,000 pages of net neutrality complaints filed by consumers against their Internet service providers. But the big document release came just one day before the deadline for the public to comment on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to repeal the net neutrality rules.
The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request in May in an attempt to get all of the net neutrality complaints received by the FCC since the rules took effect in 2015. The group also sought details on the resolution of each complaint, including ISPs' responses to each consumer.
The NHMC argued that all of the complaints should be released well in advance of the comment deadline in order to let the public evaluate the potential impact of repealing the rules. But the FCC still hasn't released the text of most of the complaints, and it has resisted calls to give the public more time to comment on the net neutrality repeal proposal.
The FCC released the biggest batch of documents to the NHMC on August 29 and a smaller batch on August 24, but the commission did not publish the documents on its website or take any other steps to make them widely available.
This is tantamount to a cover-up by the FCC, NHMC Policy and Legal Affairs Director Carmen Scurato said, demonstrating that the FCC will completely ignore the evidence that net neutrality is necessary. "This small glimpse into the universe of consumer complaints show that the FCC blatantly ignored the evidence that the agency had in its possession throughout its push to scrap the vital consumer protections established by the Open Internet Order," said Scurato.
Pai insists that there are only "isolated examples" of harm to consumers by ISPs violating the open internet rule. The 13,000 pages of complaints that the FCC finally released argue otherwise, detailing "blocking, throttling, data caps, inconsistent speeds, privacy, inaccurate disclosures, billing, and more. Complaints were filed against Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and others."