Thousands File Comments for an Open Internet

At the close of yesterday’s FCC comment period about a national Internet plan, thousands of you filed comments in support of an open, affordable Internet. This could be the biggest docket in the FCC’s history.

While we were ushering your comments to the FCC, we also took a moment (or, more accurately, hours of our research director’s time) to submit our own.

You can wade through all 306 pages of our comments – just some light reading for a summer afternoon. Or, if you’d rather not sift through it all, the gist of our comments is that the FCC should:

• Conduct a thorough review of the current state of the broadband market and the impact of past policies. Over the last decade, the FCC has not evaluated the broadband market to assess the real impact of its decisions on consumers. The FCC should produce an honest assessment of broadband deployment, develop a data-driven standard to identify local areas where providers are abusing their market power, and evaluate the impact of all past policies.
• Encourage broadband adoption through policies that increase competition. The FCC must move beyond availability. One of the main underlying barriers to broadband adoption is value -- the speeds are too slow and the prices are too high. The national broadband plan should focus on the policies that spur the deployment of high-capacity networks and drive down consumer costs.
• Treat broadband as infrastructure. President Obama recently said that America's digital infrastructure is "the backbone that underpins a prosperous economy and a strong military and an open and efficient government." The FCC should prioritize policies that promote next-generation networks, ensuring that commercial market failures do not result in weakening the nation's economic foundation.
• Protect the open Internet through strong Net Neutrality rules. The economic and social value of broadband is derived from the content and services it delivers. The FCC should expand and codify the "Internet Policy Statement" into permanent Net Neutrality rules. The FCC should also reverse the decision to classify broadband Internet access service as a pure information service, which would allow the agency to reinstate open access rules where appropriate.

In a nutshell, those are the main points of our comments, to which so many of you added your own. There’s been a stunning amount of public input on the FCC’s Notice of Inquiry on the national broadband plan – so much so that the traffic actually crashed our Web site last week.

But today is just the beginning of the fight for a plan that promotes Net Neutrality, competition and access for all Americans. While we’re confident in our filing, media industry giants and Net Neutrality opponents have been crafting their own comments that contradict ours and yours.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be sifting through the thousands of comments and offering you a chance to respond to the worst of the lot, like these two: “We have achieved nearly ubiquitous broadband deployment,” and “The U.S. is not falling behind on broadband.”

Yeah, riiiiight. Stay tuned.