Net Neutrality: After 2 Years, FCC To Make Online Speeds Public

Since 2011, the Federal Communications Commission has measured the speed of internet traffic, comparing the results to the speeds that internet service providers claim to offer, in their advertising. But since Donald Trump took office, and his appointee Ajit Pai assumed the FCC chair, the agency has stopped releasing those results to the public, according to a report by the tech site Ars Technica. Following the Ars Technica report, the FCC announced that it would finall release a new broadband speed report on Wednesday of this week—but that the results would not be issued in their own report but as part of a consolidated “Communications Marketplace Report” that will combine numerous reports that the FCC previously issued piecemeal, according to the tech site CNet. "It's downright unacceptable that the FCC—which has been collecting data on broadband speeds nationwide—refuses to make this information public," Jessica Rosenworcel, one of two Democrats on the five-member FCC board, said to CNet. "Why didn't the agency release it last year? Why is it burying it in an appendix to a larger report this year?"The revelation that the FC has been withholding broadband speed data came after the FCC repealed net neutrality rules in June, rules that prevented ISPs such as Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others from slowing some internet traffic and giving data from other content providers special treatment. Pai has claimed that net neutrality rules stifled competition and innovation among internet service firms, but former FCC officials and well as net neutrality advocates speculated that the results of the ongoing broadband speed tests would contradict Pai’s claims, according to CNet."I wonder whether a 2017 report would have undercut the chairman's argument that broadband investment somehow suffered because of the 2015 Open Internet Order," said Obama adminitration FCC official Gigi Sohn. "After all, the data shows that broadband network speeds increased after the order was adopted. If a 2018 report does come out, the FCC should release the 2017 data as well." An independent study earlier this year found that several major ISPs artificially slowed, or “throttled,” data from heavily trafficked video sites such as Netflix and YouTube. The practice of throttling was prohibited under net neutrality rules.Three United States Senators, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Ron Wyden or Oregon, recently sent a letter to telecom providers AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon demanding explanations for the data speed throttling, and whether customers may choose not to have their data slowed by the ISP giants.Photo by Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons