Vox: It’s official: the FCC has started rolling back net neutrality protections

The new Republican majority on the Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to begin the process of rolling back Barack Obama’s network neutrality rules. These rules were designed to ensure that all online content and services get equal treatment online. But Trump’s choice to lead the FCC, Ajit Pai, argues that they represent unnecessary government meddling in the internet’s infrastructure.

“The Internet wasn’t broken in 2015” before Obama’s rules went into affect, Pai said in a Thursday statement. “We were not living in a digital dystopia.” But now, as a result of the new Obama rules, “innovative providers hoping to offer their customers new, even free services had to fear a Washington bureaucracy that might disapprove.”

Liberals say that’s nonsense. While formal net neutrality rules weren’t in place before 2015, liberals argue that Obama simply codified the internet’s de facto rules of the road, locking in the open network design the internet has had since the beginning.

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