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The FCC’s Complaints Show That People Don’t Quite Understand Net Neutrality

50 complaints released by the FCC reveal a lot of frothing about overpaying for slow connections, but not much about actual net neutrality.

The Federal Communications Commission received over 2,000 complaints about net neutrality in the first month of its ruling this past February. The documents, which contained 50 of those complaints, were received by The National Journal in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

First Net Neutrality Complaints by Brendan Sasso

The regulations, which went into effect in June, were meant to address speed throttling data-heavy services (like Netflix) should they not pay a tithe to internet providers for delivering. So put in very basic terms, net neutrality is against putting some services in faster or slower lanes based off of anticompetitive business agreements.

But most of the complaints seem to be lodged directly at telecom giants for a number of reasons that aren't related to net neutrality. For instance, people are saying that their internet provider isn't delivering the speed that they advertised on contract. Or they might say that imposed data caps (which aren't quite illegal) are discriminatory. Or, they'll complain about throttling mobile speeds on people on unlimited data plans (also not illegal, though AT&T's gotten in trouble for falsely advertising speeds for it before).

All this boils down to a fairly dumb conclusion: people are using the face of net neutrality to protest against slow internet speeds, which isn't quite what it's all about. Net neutrality might have been a hill worth dying on, but even after passing it, federal workers are still being treated just as poorly as customer service agents.