Protecting net neutrality is core to the internet and crucial for people’s jobs and everyday lives. It is imperative that all internet traffic be treated equally, without discrimination against content or type of traffic — that’s the how the internet was built and what has made it one of the greatest inventions of all time.
What happened?
Last month, Mozilla filed a petition against the Federal Communications Commission for its disappointing decision to overturn the 2015 Open Internet Order because we believe it violates federal law and harms internet users and innovators.
We said that we believed the filing date should be later (while the timing seemed clear in the December 2017 draft order from the FCC, federal law is more ambiguous). We urged the FCC to determine the later date was appropriate, but we filed on January 16 because we are not taking any chances with an issue of this importance.
On Friday, the FCC filed to dismiss this suit and require us to refile after the order has been published in the Federal Register, as we had anticipated.
What’s next?
We will always fight to protect the open internet and will continue to challenge the FCC’s decision to destroy net neutrality in the courts, in Congress, and with our allies and internet users.
The FCC’s decision to destroy net neutrality rules is the result of broken processes, broken politics, and broken policies. It will end the internet as we know it, harm internet users and small businesses, erode free speech, competition, innovation and user choice in the process. In fact, it really only benefits large Internet Service Providers.
We will re-file our suit against the FCC at the appropriate time (10 days after the order is published in the Federal Register).
What can you do?
You can call your elected officials and urge them to support net neutrality and an open internet. Net neutrality is not a partisan or U.S. issue and the decision to remove protections for net neutrality is the result of broken processes, broken politics, and broken policies. We need politicians to decide to protect users and innovation online rather than increase the power of a few large ISPs.