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FCC's Own Chief Technology Officer Warned About Net Neutrality Repeal (politico.com)

Margaret Harding McGill, reporting for Politico: The Federal Communications Commission's own chief technology officer expressed concern Wednesday about Republican Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to repeal the net neutrality rules, saying it could lead to practices that are "not in the public interest." In an internal email to all of the FCC commissioner offices, CTO Eric Burger, who was appointed by Pai in October, said the No. 1 issue with the repeal is concern that internet service providers will block or throttle specific websites, according to FCC sources who viewed the message. "Unfortunately, I realize we do not address that at all," Burger said in the email. "If the ISP is transparent about blocking legal content, there is nothing the [Federal Trade Commission] can do about it unless the FTC determines it was done for anti-competitive reasons. Allowing such blocking is not in the public interest."

3 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Until this administration by Baron_Yam · · Score: 5, Interesting

    >I had never seen such single mindedness "my mind is made up don't confuse me with the facts" behaviour from US politicians.

    This isn't ignorance, but deliberate lying. They know what will happen, it just happens to be in alignment with their desires.

    This is what happens when you put a fox in charge of the hen house. When a bunch of rich people obviously want to reduce the impediments to getting richer and have a history of making moves in that direction, it's probably a bad idea to take them at their word when they say they're going to help you out at their expense.

  2. While everyone was distracted by DeplorableCodeMonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Disney bought 21st Century Fox. All of it. That means the Foul Rodent Empire is increasingly in a monopolistic position in the movie, TV and sports content fields, plus they have a nice chunk of Hulu.

    But thank God Netflix might not face a little discrimination from Comcast or Verizon if they don't work out an agreement for all of that data that floods their networks. That'll save Netflix from one day being just another acquisition target of Disney at a reduced price after Disney chokes off most of the desirable content and forces Netflix to produce its own or go broke.

    1. Re:While everyone was distracted by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Netflix already partners with Comcast. Their app in now preinstalled on all their X1 cable boxes.