UPDATE: EFF spokesman Dave Maas told The Daily Caller on Friday that EFF staffer Jeremy Gillula “was scheduled to attend the [Sept. 23 White House] meeting, he was caught up in traffic and never made it to the venue.”
WASHINGTON — Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a liberal telecom advocacy organization, suddenly does not like the net neutrality proposal being pushed by the Obama administration.
According to the White House visitors log, EFF staff technologist Jeremy Gillula joined 29 other pro-net neutrality activists at a September 2014 meeting with Obama senior Internet adviser David Edelman in the Old Executive Office Building, six weeks before President Obama announced his Title II Internet regulation.
EFF is now changing course and posted a “Dear FCC” memo on its website.
“According to the FCC’s own ‘Fact Sheet,‘ the proposed rule will allow the FCC to review (and presumably punish) non-neutral practices that may ‘harm’ consumers or edge providers. Late last week, as the window for public comment was closing, EFF filed a letter with the FCC urging it to clarify and sharply limit the scope of any ‘general conduct’ provision,” EFF staffer Corynne McSherry wrote.
“Unfortunately, if a recent report from Reuters is correct, the general conduct rule will be anything but clear,” McSherry continued. “The FCC will evaluate ‘harm’ based on consideration of seven factors: impact on competition; impact on innovation; impact on free expression; impact on broadband deployment and investments; whether the actions in question are specific to some applications and not others; whether they comply with industry best standards and practices; and whether they take place without the awareness of the end-user, the Internet subscriber.”
The EFF staffer says that the general conduct provision “will suggest that the FCC believes it has broad authority to pursue any number of practices — hardly the narrow, light-touch approach we need to protect the open Internet.”
Additionally, McSherry said that EFF believes the rule will be “extremely expensive in practice, because anyone wanting to bring a complaint will be hard-pressed to predict whether they will succeed.”
Later noting that the rule gives the FCC too much discretion and potentially unfair advantage to those with “insider influence,” she asked how the commission will determine “industry best standards and practices?”