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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

FCC chairman Ajit Pai is genuinely one of the nicest people in Washington. He’s smart, personable, and the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with. But nice guys don’t always make good policy (I’ve been bipartisan on this), and Pai’s record means real danger for American consumers and the internet itself. If you believe communications networks should be fast, fair, open, and affordable, you need ask your senator to vote against Pai’s reconfirmation. Now.

In 2015, net neutrality advocates celebrated what seemed to be the final step in ensuring an open internet when the Federal Communications Commission officially reclassified broadband internet service as a public utility, just like telephone lines. But the celebration has been short-lived. Soon after the Trump administration entered the White House, the FCC’s new Chairman Ajit Pai announced that he would seek to reverse his predecessor’s efforts, and instead pursue “a light-touch regulatory framework” towards internet service providers.

In an op-ed, Wozniak and Michael Copps, who led the FCC from 2001 to 2011, argued the rollback will threaten freedom for internet users and may corrode democracy.

The FCC should not let a few giant gatekeepers speed up and slow down their preferred sites and services. It should move us all into the fast lane.

Pai says that the introduction of net neutrality rules in 2015 caused investment from carriers to go down by 9 percent, but his claim is rather misleading.