As we’ve been reporting over the course of the past few months, the FCC has issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) on Net Neutrality where the FCC’s chairman, Tom Wheeler, and the remaining 4 members of the FCC’s panel voted to approve such a notice. Upon approval, they entered a comment period which was supposed to end on July 15th, but upon that deadline coming to and end, their site became bogged down and crashed completely. As such, they extended the deadline until the end of today at midnight. Since that deadline was extended, the FCC has reported that they have now received over 1 million comments in their system regarding the Net Neutrality NPRM. In fact, the FCC’s own Gigi Sohn reported via Twitter that they had exactly 1,045,000 comments as of only a few hours ago.

Here’s your daily #netneutrality comment update. As of noon, 1,057,000 comments filed. Deadline 4 initial comments is today at midnight.

— Gigi Sohn (@GigiBSohnFCC) July 18, 2014

I honestly do not believe that the FCC or anyone expected that they would be getting over 1 million comments regarding Net Neutrality. What will be interesting is to see how the FCC will deal with all of these comments and how long it will take them to read them all. After all, they did say that they will take everyone’s comments into account and there is going to have to be some sort of way that they’ll read through them all. The FCC is usually wading through a few dozen to a few hundred comments that could easily be read by one person in a day or two. But this issue has spurred so much public interest and uproar that I believe they are not going to be able to read all of the messages that people have written to the FCC regarding Net Neutrality.

But even so, these 1 million comments send a message to the FCC and the rest of the government, that if you are going to try to mess with the internet you’re going to have to deal with a lot of very active and angry people and I can only imagine what kinds of curse words are in some of the comments left for the FCC.

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The FCC recently decided that they would have a Twitter chat with the public via Twitter using the hashtag #FCCNetNeutrality. Using this hashtag, for an hour, Gigi Sohn the FCC’s Special Counsel for External Affairs would answer questions for the FCC’s Office of the Chairman. Which would essentially mean that she is representing the Chairman, Tom Wheeler, even though he didn’t participate directly in the chat itself. So many people started asking questions and tweeting and retweeting the #FCCNetNeutrality hashtag that it became the number one trending topic on Twitter at that time.

FCC Net Neutrality

In addition to responding to users that tweeted the #FCCNetNeutrality hastag, Gigi Sohn actually responded to me as one of the people asking about Net Neutrality. I was complaining (as us journalists usually do) about the fact that the FCC is constantly talking about and asking about comment from the public but doesn’t actually tell us how our comments affect their decision making process. Surprisingly enough, Gigi responded directly to me, which I must admit is very honorable of her to do considering how hostile much of the Net Neutrality crowd has been. Most of my negativity about this comment process has been with the fact that the email responses that I got from Chairman Wheeler and the Open Internet initiative were effectively the exact same email with a few formatting differences. Sure, they were probably getting bombarded by the public, but that’s kind of their own fault, really.

Ultimately, it appears that the FCC is being somewhat responsive to the public’s desire to be heard and protect the internet. The way that FCC Chairman Tom Wheller talked about Net Neutrality with his Open Internet initiative simply didn’t rub a lot of people the right way. This is primarily because of the vague nature of his proposal and the fact that it didn’t really protect the internet in a way that would make it the successful medium it has been for so long. Obviously, his past reflects quite poorly upon his motives and a lot of people question whether or not the FCC is capable of properly regulating the ISPs considering how many of them are former telecom executives and how many of them will likely go back to working for those companies after their terms end.

There has been a lot of talk that if the FCC wants to regulate Net Neutrality and protect an ‘Open Internet’ that they should reclassify ISPs as common carriers and to regulate them that way. However, many people, including Tom Wheeler see that as a nuclear option, even though they haven’t quite explained what is wrong with that perspective on things. After all, the current ISPs have already taken $200 billion of our money to build a nationwide broadband fiber service and to this day we basically haven’t seen a shred of that. Meanwhile, the ISPs continue to charge more money for worse service while claiming that they are getting better and better as the US gets left behind by countries like Korea.

The post FCC Chats Net Neutrality with the Public on Twitter appeared first on VR World.

The FCC recently decided that they would have a Twitter chat with the public via Twitter using the hashtag #FCCNetNeutrality. Using this hashtag, for an hour, Gigi Sohn the FCC’s Special Counsel for External Affairs would answer questions for the FCC’s Office of the Chairman. Which would essentially mean that she is representing the Chairman, Tom Wheeler, even though he didn’t participate directly in the chat itself. So many people started asking questions and tweeting and retweeting the #FCCNetNeutrality hashtag that it became the number one trending topic on Twitter at that time.

FCC Net Neutrality

In addition to responding to users that tweeted the #FCCNetNeutrality hastag, Gigi Sohn actually responded to me as one of the people asking about Net Neutrality. I was complaining (as us journalists usually do) about the fact that the FCC is constantly talking about and asking about comment from the public but doesn’t actually tell us how our comments affect their decision making process. Surprisingly enough, Gigi responded directly to me, which I must admit is very honorable of her to do considering how hostile much of the Net Neutrality crowd has been. Most of my negativity about this comment process has been with the fact that the email responses that I got from Chairman Wheeler and the Open Internet initiative were effectively the exact same email with a few formatting differences. Sure, they were probably getting bombarded by the public, but that’s kind of their own fault, really.

Ultimately, it appears that the FCC is being somewhat responsive to the public’s desire to be heard and protect the internet. The way that FCC Chairman Tom Wheller talked about Net Neutrality with his Open Internet initiative simply didn’t rub a lot of people the right way. This is primarily because of the vague nature of his proposal and the fact that it didn’t really protect the internet in a way that would make it the successful medium it has been for so long. Obviously, his past reflects quite poorly upon his motives and a lot of people question whether or not the FCC is capable of properly regulating the ISPs considering how many of them are former telecom executives and how many of them will likely go back to working for those companies after their terms end.

There has been a lot of talk that if the FCC wants to regulate Net Neutrality and protect an ‘Open Internet’ that they should reclassify ISPs as common carriers and to regulate them that way. However, many people, including Tom Wheeler see that as a nuclear option, even though they haven’t quite explained what is wrong with that perspective on things. After all, the current ISPs have already taken $200 billion of our money to build a nationwide broadband fiber service and to this day we basically haven’t seen a shred of that. Meanwhile, the ISPs continue to charge more money for worse service while claiming that they are getting better and better as the US gets left behind by countries like Korea.

The post FCC Chats Net Neutrality with the Public on Twitter appeared first on VR World.