This is it. This is the day that your overly specific and impressively sceptical questions about the Federal Communications Commission’s new net neutrality rules can finally be answered. The agency just released the full text of the policy that will protect the open internet.
The full 400 pages of the FCC’s policy and research on net neutrality aren’t exactly beach reading, but the minutia are integral to the rules’ lifespan. These are the nitpicky things that big cable companies plan to challenge in court, the things that Republicans in Congress will use as ammunition to strip the agency of its power to regulate the internet.
In a sobering way, the battle is just beginning. As one analyst told The New York Times, “Telecom lawyers in Washington popped the corks on the champagne. It will be at a least a hundred million in billable hours for them. This will go on for a while.”
But there’s another quote that better expresses the historical weight of the decision — the first two sentences of the actual rules, now a part of the public record:
The open Internet drives the American economy and serves, every day, as a critical tool for America’s citizens to conduct commerce, communicate, educate, entertain, and engage in the world around them. The benefits of an open Internet are undisputed.
Net neutrality is a good start, now let’s defend the open web more fiercely and fix everything that is shitty about the oligarchical broken internet.