When it comes to whether and how the government should ensure net neutrality on the Internet, record numbers of people wanted to put in their 2 cents.
More than 3 million comments were submitted to the Federal Communications Commission on its so-called Open Internet proposal by the time the comment period ended at midnight Eastern Time on Tuesday morning. That s more than double the number of submitted for the FCC issue that had previously drawn the most comments — Janet Jackson s infamous wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, which drew 1.4 million comments.
About half of the submissions on the Open Internet proposal came in a final flurry over the last five days, according to the agency, as interest groups on both sides of the issue encouraged members and like-thinking individuals to weigh in.
Fight for Future and others did a large campaign and submitted a large bulk of comments, said Kim Hart, an agency spokeswoman.
Hart declined to characterize the substance of the comments, saying agency staffers were in the process of analyzing them. Most of the initial comments on the proposal were in support of net neutrality, but many of them expressed concern over the substance of the FCC s proposal and whether it would guarantee an open Internet.
With the comment period now over, the FCC is holding a series of round table discussions with industry experts to get feedback on particular aspects of its proposed rules. The agency held the first two of those discussions on Tuesday to discuss both its potential policy options to guarantee net neutrality and on how it should apply such rules to mobile broadband providers.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has said that he wants to have a final rule in place by the end of the year. However, the agency doesn t yet have a timeline for when it will unveil the final rule or vote on it.
The comment period that ended on Monday was actually the second one on the issue. It followed immediately after the initial comment period ended in July and was supposed to be devoted to responses to the more than 1 million comments submitted in that period alone.
Unveiled this spring, the Open Internet proposal represents the FCC s third stab at trying to put net neutrality rules in place. Its previous two efforts were thrown out by federal courts.
The new proposal would prohibit Internet service providers from blocking or throttling access to particular sites or services. But it would allow them to create so-called fast lanes, where they could charge extra to content providers to deliver their data at faster speeds than regular Internet traffic.
The proposal has drawn fire from both consumer and industry groups. Consumer groups — backed by many Internet content companies such as Netflix and Google — have criticized the fast-lane piece of the proposal, saying that it would fundamentally change the Internet and make it into something much more like cable TV, where telecommunications companies have much greater control over the content that users can access. Last week, some 10,000 Web sites participated in an Internet slowdown to protest the fast-lane proposal.
Many of consumer groups have proposed that the FCC should create a much stronger rule that would be grounded in the agency s power to regulate so-called common carriers, companies that are required to treat all customers equally.
Meanwhile, the big telecommunications companies and their supporters have questioned whether net neutrality rules are needed at all and stated that they would go to court to block any effort to reclassify them as common carriers.
H/T to The Wall Street Journal.
