FCC Refuses to Release 47,000 Net Neutrality Complaints

FCC Refuses to Release 47,000 Net Neutrality Complaints

The current FCC likes to insist that net neutrality isn't a real problem to help justify their attack on the current net neutrality rules. Yet Ars Technica notes the agency is fighting a request to release more than 47,000 net neutrality complaints that it has received since June 2015. The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request in May of this year to obtain the complaints, claiming seeing the feedback of impacted customers is necessary to understand the impact of the FCC's decision to scrap the rules.

But FCC chief Ajit Pai, who has long insisted that anti-competitive behavior and net neutrality violations, clearly doesn't want that analysis to happen ahead of his final vote to kill the rules later this year.

The coalition had urged the FCC to extend the initial public comment deadline until 60 days after the commission fully complies with the FoIA request, though the FCC this week denied this motion (pdf) for any such extension, in addition to fighting the release of the stockpiled complaints.

This decision comes after Ajit Pai has repeatedly insisted he'd run a far more transparent ship than his predecessor Tom Wheeler, while also claiming that the 2015 rules were a response to "hypothetical harms and hysterical prophecies of doom."

Of course we've well documented how a lack of competition in broadband has resulted in all manner of anti-competitive behavior from major ISPs, ranging from using usage caps as a weapon against streaming competitors to charging customers significantly more money if they want to protect their own privacy.

Of course Pai knows these harms are very real, and he also knows that publicly releasing them undermines his case against killing what are very popular consumer protections.