These laws were drawn up with the best of intentions. They were supposed to protect us. But, sadly, they're being used for nefarious purposes.

So we've noted a few times how Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Charter lobbyists have not only been lobbying the FCC to kill popular net neutrality protections, but they're also lobbying for a new net neutrality law. Why would they kill one set of rules only to push for the creation of another? These ISPs know the current cash-compromised Congress is so dysfunctional that such a law either won't happen, or if it does will be written by ISP lobbyists intent on making it as flimsy as possible.

Apple has historically kept quiet on the subject of net neutrality, but not anymore. The company recently filed a comment with the FCC calling for "strong, enforceable open internet protections" centered around the principles of consumer choice, transparency and competition. Apple got its comments in just under the wire, too: the FCC's electronic commenting system says the filing, signed by Apple Public Policy VP Cynthia Hogan, was received on the last day public comments were allowed.

A U.S. House committee said on Wednesday it has canceled a planned hearing on Sept. 7 on the future of internet access rules after no companies publicly committed to appearing. Among those who had been invited in late July to share thoughts before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee were the chief executives of Alphabet Inc, Facebook Inc, AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc.

The FCC has received nearly 22m comments on “Restoring Internet Freedom” with just hours left before the window for public feedback closes on Wednesday

It feels like it’s been months, rather than years, since the tech community last banded together in support of net neutrality, and achieved an unprecedented victory over broadband providers. And yet, once again, we are forced to fight for a more free, more fair internet, one where internet providers can’t use their positions in the market to crush competing services we use every day.

The Federal Communications Commission is being pressured to release the text of 47,000 net neutrality complaints before going through with Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to eliminate net neutrality rules. The FCC has refused to release the text of most neutrality complaints despite a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request that asked for all complaints filed since June 2015. The FCC has provided 1,000 complaints to the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), which filed the public records request but said last month that it's too "burdensome" to redact personally identifiable information from all 47,000.

A common refrain in popular news media is that net neutrality is just too boring and esoteric for ordinary people to be interested in. “Oh my god that is the most boring thing I’ve ever seen,” John Oliver (HBO, 6/1/14) once exclaimed after showing his audience a short clip from a government hearing on the subject. “That is even boring by C-SPAN standards.”

Shortly after Ajit Pai was named chair of the Federal Communications Commission in February, he said he wanted the agency to be “as open and accessible as possible to the American people." Six months on, the agency is falling short of Pai’s lofty goal in some key areas. Critics are especially concerned about the FCC’s handling of complaints from the public about internet providers and the causes of a May 7 outage of the public-comments section of the agency’s website.

Maybe it’s a busy political news cycle, perhaps fatigue, or even worse, it might just be a lack of understanding, but the FCC voted this year to roll back Net Neutrality to much less resistance seen in previous efforts. Despite a fervent tech community voicing concern, very few people seemed able to muster up enough concern to protest this decision.

A Federal Judge has shot down an AT&T lawsuit against the city of Louisville, one of several company bids to slow down Google Fiber's arrival to the region. AT&T sued the city back in February of last year after Louisville streamlined its utility pole attachment rules to speed up the arrival of competing broadband services to the city. Incumbent ISPs have long abused the absurdly bureaucratic pole attachment process to slow competitors, and Louisville's "one touch make ready" reforms streamlined the process significantly.

You’ll have two extra weeks to file your thoughts with the FCC on its plan to get rid of net neutrality. The proposal’s comment period was originally scheduled to end next week, on August 16th, but the commission just pushed the date out to August 30th. The extension was granted in response to 10 groups asking for more time to respond. They had been looking for an additional eight weeks, but the commission said an additional two weeks would be more in line with the type of extensions granted in the past.

When the Federal Communications Commission went looking this year for experts to sit on an advisory committee regarding deployment of high-speed internet, Gary Carter thought he would be a logical choice. Carter works for the city of Santa Monica, California, where he oversees City Net, one of the oldest municipal-run networks in the nation. The network sells high-speed internet to local businesses, and uses the revenue in part to connect low-income neighborhoods.

Imagine if you took every single gripe you've had with Verizon over the past five years — the time it blocked Nexus 7 tablets for five months; the time it forced you to pay $20 per month for tethering; the time it tried to make you use a mobile wallet app called "ISIS" — and finally put your foot down. For a year, you spend free moments holed up in library stacks, speaking with experts, and researching and writing a sprawling legal complaint about the company's many, many misdeeds.

At this point, more than sixteen million comments have been filed in response to the FCC's myopic plan to kill net neutrality protections, the majority of them in fierce opposition to the idea. We've also noted how more than 900 startups, countless engineers, and a wave of large companies and websites have similarly urged Ajit Pai to stop, pause, and actually listen to what the majority of the country is saying. And what they're saying is that they want Title II and net neutrality protections to remain in place to protect them from giant telecom duopolies with long histories of fiercely-anti-competitive behavior.

A second lawsuit has been filed against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week over the secrecy shrouding its plans to kill off net neutrality. An investigative journalist filed paperwork suing the FCC in New York Wednesday afternoon, accusing the agency of improperly withholding records about a May cyberattack that it claims temporarily took down a website used by the public to participate in the net neutrality debate. Specifically, the FCC has been accused of violating the...

The Federal Communications Commission is pushing back on a report claiming the agency didn’t document a May cyberattack it credited with knocking its website offline while users tried to file comments on a plan to repeal net neutrality rules. Gizmodo published a story Thursday that claims the FCC “holds no records” or “analysis” of multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks the agency says crashed its electronic comment filing system in May. The attacks followed a “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” segment...

American leadership in technology innovation and economic competitiveness is at risk if U.S. policymakers don’t take crucial steps to protect the country’s digital future. The country that gave the world the internet and the very concept of the disruptive startup could find its role in the global innovation economy slipping from reigning incumbent to a disrupted has-been.

Yesterday, we reported that Verizon Wireless appeared to be throttling Netflix traffic, — and today, the company seems to have come clean. In a statement provided to Ars Technica and The Verge, Verizon implicitly admitted to capping the traffic, blaming the issue on a temporary video optimization test. “We've been doing network testing over the past few days to optimize the performance of video applications on our network," a Verizon Wireless spokesperson said. “The testing should be completed shortly. The customer video experience was not affected.”

The US Federal Communications Commission says it has no written analysis of DDoS attacks that hit the commission's net neutrality comment system in May. In its response to a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request filed by Gizmodo, the FCC said its analysis of DDoS attacks "stemmed from real time observation and feedback by Commission IT staff and did not result in written documentation."