FCC Commish Says Community-Run ISPs Pose Threat to Free Speech

After eliminating net neutrality rules, allowing the big internet service providers to block or slow online traffic from whichever sites they wish, the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission may be looking to take down a new target: small, locally operated ISPs. According to an account by the tech site Motherboard, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly (pictured above), a Republican, asserted in a speech last week that the smaller ISPs, often run by state and local governments, pose a threat to free speech. While most Americans access the internet through giant telecommunications companies such as AT&T, Comcast or Verizon, at least 750 communities across the country have built their own broadband networks, Motherboard reports, as a way offering alternatives to the big telecom firms and their slow online data speeds, hefty fees and often unresponsive customer service—problems could now become even worse with net neutrality regulations lifted. The rules prohibited ISPs from discriminating against some traffic by slowing it, while charging additional fees to data providers for access to an internet fast lane—fees that would be passed on to internet users. But according to a Harvard University research study, community networks on average offer higher quality service at a lower cost than the large, corporate ISPs. In what could be an indicator, however, that the Donald Trump administration will target the community ISPs for elimination, O’Rielly—in a speech last week at a conference funded by the telecommunications industry—claimed without citing any empirical evidence, that the very existence of such community networks is an “ominous” development. “I would be remiss if my address omitted a discussion of a lesser-known, but particularly ominous, threat to the First Amendment in the age of the Internet: state-owned and operated broadband networks,” O’Rielly said in the speech. “In addition to creating competitive distortions and misdirecting scarce resources that should go to bringing broadband to the truly unserved areas, municipal broadband networks have engaged in significant First Amendment mischief.” O’Rielly said that the fact that several locally-owned networks have sought to limit the spread of hate speech online is “frightening,” and that terms such as “hateful” and “threatening” are “impossible to interpret objectively, and are inherently up to the whim of a bureaucrat’s discretion.” His comments on October 24 came in the same week that a gunman influenced by online anti-Semitic conspiracy theories killed 11 in a mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh—and another man who consumed and reposted numerous conspiracy theories about billionaire philanthropist George Soros mailed a bombs to the home of Soros, as well as to more than a dozen other prominent critics of Donald Trump. Photo By Federal Communications Commission / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain