The Federal Communications Commission voted 3–2 to impose net neutrality rules today, restoring the common-carrier regulatory framework enforced during the Obama era and then abandoned while Trump was president.
The rules prohibit Internet service providers from blocking and throttling lawful content and ban paid prioritization.
“Consumers have made clear to us they do not want their broadband provider cutting sweetheart deals, with fast lanes for some services and slow lanes for others,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said at today’s meeting.
This is the “fourth year surge,” where 1st term presidents rush to get a lot of positive policy change so they look like they’re doing a good job. They tend to pass more legislation and use fewer executive orders during this time.
Some of the policy that previous presidents are best known for were passed during this surge time, including Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Civil Rights Act, Federal Highway Aid Act, Equal Pay act, etc.
Here, asking “why” is asking “what is their incentive”.
There may be some merit to saying that a president is an entire branch of government and cycling out staff in key positions to get them in political alignment can take a lot of time. Biden’s admin has had to re-staff many departments after Trump.
It’s literally not that at all. It was about the GOP gumming up the appointment process to the FCC board. Democratic party appointees have only had a 3-2 majority on the FCC board for about 6 months.
Thanks for the context in this specific case in response to my last paragraph.
So you’re saying it could have been done 6 months ago but is only now being done in the 4th year of Biden’s term?
It’s not like they just sat around and did nothing for 6 months. The vote was scheduled almost a month ago, and there was a period to draft the rules, a period to accept comments and feedback, etc. Things were in motion behind the scenes, we’re just seeing the end result of the last 6 months.
Thank you for stating the context! People always want magic wand fixes but changing rules and laws at government level have so many moving parts and counteracting forces to overcome. It takes time. Too many people just immediately assume it’s some negative skeptical reason without knowing the details.
The funny thing is, many of us on Lemmy work in software development. We’re often having to explain to people “yes, I know this looks like it should take 2 weeks, but it’s more complex than that. You just don’t have the technical or institutional expertise to understand what’s happening behind the scenes.”
Clearly you don’t understand how slow things are in government. 6 months is a really fast turnaround for the government to get anything done.