By Sean Captain in Fast Company.
With FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to dismantle net neutrality protections now official, internet regulation has joined healthcare and climate change among the big areas where the Trump Administration is aggressively dismantling Obama-era policies. In the latter two cases, cities and states have some leeway to go against Washington. States administer their own health programs for low-income residents, for instance; and some, like California, are talking about radically extending them. Meanwhile states and cities are uniting to make their own climate change policy pledges.
It may not be so easy to get around the administration’s internet policies. Ars Technica reports that, along with scrapping Obama-era regulations, FCC officials led by Pai plan to preempt states and cities from enacting their own, stricter polices, to prevent things like “throttling,” or limiting bandwidth, for certain content if content providers (or consumers) don’t pay extra.
“I don’t think states have the authority to require network neutrality, so once the Trump administration guts the open internet, it will be up to individual ISPs,” writes Christopher Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, in an email to Fast Company. He heads the organization’s Community Broadband Networks project, which encourages municipal-run networks as an alternative to major private ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon.
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