Net-“Sue-Me”-Neutrality: Get Ready for the Spring Offensive

How we ended up here: The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal and Free the Net.”

First, congrats to those who helped to get the pendulum to swing back a bit from the anti-customer, ‘we’re the phone company’ position. We’ll see how long it lasts.

The count-down has started and by the end of next week, or once the entire Open Internet (Net Neutrality) rules are put out (we have only an outline as of this writing), you can expect a lawyers’ banquet, a feeding frenzy where they will file and file and file.

There were actually two items that were presented by the FCC:

• Allowing municipalities to offer competitive broadband and Internet in areas where the incumbent cable and phone companies didn’t deliver.
• “Open Internet”, Net Neutrality rules.

On the municipality front — A group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, created ‘model legislation” to close down the rights of municipalitiesand they have led the charge and already got over 20 states to use this legislation. This legislation is penned by (and/or with the assistance of) the ALEC corporate members, which include AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, and then given to waiting state politicians, most of whom are funded and groomed by these companies, (or who also received foundation grant money to spend in their districts to make them look good).

And this is not new. I’ve been writing about this since at least 2007.

(As we pointed out, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai congratulated ALEC on its ‘model legislation’ at an event in 2013.)

We expect ‘law-suits-a-plenty’ in all state and federal jurisdictions. Remember, they have massive amounts of lobbying dollars, fake astroturf consumer groups, corporate-funded think-tanks — and a series of skunkworks (hidden) networks to coordinate these attacks, not to mention tens of thousands of anxiously awaiting lawyers, (their own and outside firms), all chomping at the bit for this race to begin.