The FCC has had a rough couple days. Controversy exploded when a Wall Street Journal report warned that the commission is considering new rules that would tear down the core principles of net neutrality and allow already-powerful internet service providers to act as the internet’s greedy gatekeepers. Since then, the FCC has made several attempts to reverse the panic and outrage that quickly set in after the report that Chairman Tom Wheeler blasted as “flat out wrong.”
The FCC’s upcoming net neutrality plan has already touched off such a blaze of reaction that the agency has set up an email box where the public can send comments about it. The coming proposal has generated so much commentary, before even being released, that on Friday the U.S. Federal Communications Commission started accepting comments at openinternet@fcc.gov. Normally, anyone who wanted to weigh in on an FCC proposal would have to wait for the agency to issue a “notice of proposed rulemaking” and start soliciting comments to its Electronic Comment Filing System. That will happen for the net neutrality issue on May 15, assuming the full Commission votes at its meeting that day to move the proposal forward.