The FTC Says It's Totally Cool With Anti-Competitive Internet Fast Lanes

The FTC Says It's Totally Cool With Anti-Competitive Internet Fast Lanes

5 years ago
Anonymous $syBn1NGQOq

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190401/07451241918/ftc-says-totally-cool-with-anti-competitive-internet-fast-lanes.shtml

As we've noted for a while, the FCC's attack on net neutrality did much more than just kill net neutrality. It also gutted much of the FCC's authority over broadband providers entirely, making it harder than ever for the agency to police the behavior of historically anti-competitive giants like Comcast NBC Universal and AT&T Time Warner. What authority the government now has to oversee one of the more broken sectors in American industry got shoveled instead to the FTC, an agency critics say lacks the authority or resources to police broadband. That's the entire reason ISP lobbyists pushed for the plan.

Yet throughout the repeal, broadband providers and FCC head Ajit Pai stated that people didn't need to worry because if ISPs did anything wrong, the FTC and antitrust enforcement would stand as a last line of defense. But any expectations that modern, eroded antitrust authority would protect consumers and competitors were quickly ruined by the recent AT&T and Time Warner legal face plant, widely mocked as one of the more clueless rulings in tech policy history.

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