FCC will fix America's shitty internet by declaring fast internet access unimportant to Americans

Cory Doctorow 8:17 am Thu Aug 10, 2017

America's internet is sucks and the law obliges the FCC to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market," but dingo-babysitter Ajit Pai (a former telcoms lobbyist that Donald Trump put in charge of the FCC) has a counterproposal: just declare fast internet unimportant to Americans, and hope that they'll put up with slow mobile broadband instead of blazing-fast wired connections.

The move would change the FCC's definition of fast broadband from the current world-lagging 25Mbps/3Mbps to a pitiable 10Mbps/1Mbps.

The changes were signaled yesterday in a Notice of Inquiry, the FCC's first step toward completing a new analysis of broadband deployment. The document asks the public for comments on a variety of questions, including whether mobile broadband can substitute for fixed Internet connections. You can file comments at this link; initial comments are due September 7, and reply comments are due September 22.

Maybe Americans don’t need fast home Internet service, FCC suggests
[Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica]

(Image: Jürgen Schoner
, CC-BY-SA)

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