Why do 87% of Americans hold a favorable view of Net Neutrality? Not because the vast majority of the country has become wonkishly interested in the intersection of competition policy and telcoms regulation: it's because they care about the internet. Read the rest

Today, Senate Democrats will force a vote on whether to rescue Net Neutrality from the depredations of Vichy nerd Ajit Pai; the debate is streaming now and will continue until 3PM Eastern/12PM Pacific, when the Senate will vote. Read the rest

Andrew Rice's long profile of neutracidal FCC chairman Ajit Pai paints a portrait of a genuine nerd who really loves the ways the internet let him escape his small-town life, who really dotes on memes and Star Wars, and who threw fun parties when he was a young man -- and who is a textbook bootlicker, convinced that corporations will save America from the tyranny of government overreach, and who decided that if Trump was the way to get there, he would carry water for Trump. Read the rest

If you move into a new place and start service from Comcast -- increasingly the only way to get internet service in many places -- the company will often charge you a $90 installation fee, even if the previous occupants had already installed Comcast service, and even if you buy and set up your own modem. Read the rest

Net Neutrality is extraordinarily, improbably popular with Americans: 87% of Americans have both heard of Net Neutrality and believe it should be protected; virtually the only opponents Net Neutrality has are telcoms lobbyists and politicians who've had money funneled their way through telcoms PACs and direct contributions. Read the rest

Comcast is a perennial winner of national polls for the most hated company in America, and the bigger it gets, the worse it gets: back in 2011, the Obama administration let the company swallow NBC Universal, teeing it up to powerfully benefit from the destruction of Net Neutrality under Trump; now Trump is poised to let the company buy Fox and Sky, making the company bigger and more powerful. Read the rest

Back when the anti-Net-Neutrality was pretending to have anything like an argument (apart from, "NETWORK NEUTRALITY INTERFERES WITH MY ABILITY TO BECOME LIMITLESSLY RICH, GO FUCK YOURSELF), one of the stupid pieces of spaghetti they threw at the wall was, "The FCC shouldn't regulate telcos, that's the FTC's job." Read the rest

Comcast has found a new way to stem "cord-cutting" (cutting off your cable TV subscription in favor of subscription services like Netflix, or, as in my case, in favor of giving up on watching TV altogether); in markets where they are a monopoly or duopoly, they will reserve their highest-speed internet offerings for customers who agree to pay extra for cable channels that they don't want or need -- if all you want is internet access, Comcast will relegate you to its slow lanes. Read the rest

As states pass a wave of laws barred non-neutral ISPs from providing services to state agencies, more than 100 US mayors have pledged to disqualify non-neutral ISPs from getting city contracts as well. Read the rest

Cloudflare, a company with a history of resisting surveillance and censorship orders (albeit imperfectly and sometimes with undesirable consequences) has announced a new DNS service, hosted at the easy-to-remember address of 1.1.1.1, which accepts connections under the still-novel DNS-over-HTTPS protocol, and which has privacy designed in, with all logs written only to RAM (never to disk) and flushed every 24 hours. Read the rest

Jonathan Spalter is the CEO of Ustelecom, a telcoms lobby group funded by AT&T and Verizon; in an op-ed on the lobbyists' site, he threatened to "aggressively" sue any state that passes net neutrality rules. Read the rest

Chances are, your ISP has been repeatedly caught sucking up all your clicks, and also chances are that it's a de facto arm of the US spy network, making bank selling your data to the NSA; AT&T has proposed charging you hundreds of dollars extra a year not to spy on you; Comcast wants to do the same. Read the rest

When it comes to killing Net Neutrality, Big Telco's major talking point is that "government regulation" has no place in telcoms; but the reality is that the nation's telecommunications providers are the recipients of regulatory gifts that run to $5B/year, and are expected to do very little in return for this corporate welfare. Read the rest

In Packets, Please, you are the boss of CosmoCast, a corrupt, post-Net Neutrality ISP; your job is to "boost, throttle or disconnect" people based on their activities -- you can boost Trump's tweets, disconnect political dissidents, and throttle rival video-on-demand services, working at breakneck speed to keep the packets flowing in the way that optimizes the internet for your shareholders at the expense of your users. Read the rest

Calling the FCC's decision to kill Net Neutrality the "road to serfdom" Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR] introduced the legislation he'd co-sponsored with Senator Ed Markey [D-MA] to restore Neutrality. Read the rest

It's CPAC! The annual far-right hootenanny for preppers, false-flaggers, climate deniers, truthers, and the sort of person who closes their eyes and thinks of The Fountainhead, featuring Marion Maréchal-Le Pen of France, Nigel Farage, Sean Hannity, and mass-murder enthusiast Wayne LaPierre. Read the rest

Ajit Pai's Net Neutrality-killing order is scheduled to go into effect on April 23, and when that happens, it'll be open season on the free, fair and open internet. Read the rest