Just as the FCC released more than 1.4GB worth of net neutrality comments, President Barack Obama clarified his own thoughts on the proposed rules.
During Tuesday's U.S.-Africa business forum, the president took a strong stance against net neutrality.
"[W]hat has facilitated the incredible value that's been built by companies like Google and Facebook and so many others—all the applications that you find on your smartphone—is that there are not restrictions, there are not barriers to entry for new companies who have a good idea to use this platform that is open to create value. And it is very important, I think, that we maintain that," Obama told 21-year-old Takunda Chingonzo, a young entrepreneur from Zimbabwe working in the wireless tech space.
Net neutrality has been making headlines all year, after the FCC's rules were struck down by an appeals court, forcing the agency to return to the drawing board. But when it returned with the idea of implementing "fast lanes"—a process by which companies charge a premium for high-speed connections—the world pushed back.
And while Obama did not distinctly mention "fast lanes," he suggested that "we should be … trying to maintain an open Internet."
"[T]he position of my administration, as well as I think a lot of companies here, is that you don't want to start getting a differentiation in how accessible the Internet is to various users," the President explained. "You want to leave it open so that the next Google or the next Facebook can succeed.
The leader of the free world isn't the only one slamming the FCC: In May, a coalition of top Internet firms—from Google and Amazon to Facebook and Twitter—penned a letter to the commission, expressing concern with their rules. House Republicans followed up with a letter of their own, urging Chairman Tom Wheeler (pictured, with Obama) to back off net neutrality regulation.
In mid-May, a divided FCC voted to proceed with the net neutrality proposal—a move that simply kicks off the rulemaking process, but does not mean immediate implementation.
It also opened the doors for public comment, which flooded the commission's website and forced a deadline extension of July 18. Less than three weeks later, the FCC made the comments available to the public in a series of six XML files, totaling 2.5-times the amount of plain-text data found in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
While not everyone has the technical skills to build XML data into a comprehensible structure, the FCC hopes "those who do have the technical know-how will develop and share these tools for the public to use."
According to TechCrunch, which sorted through two files of results, the term "free speech" earned 2,322 mentions, beating Netflix, which garnered 1,903. Comcast, however, won the top spot with 4,613 mentions.
For more, see Net Neutrality: What's Really Happening? as well as Net Neutrality and the Ghettoization of the Internet.