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Verizon’s Mocking Response To The FCC’s Net Neutrality Vote Is Perfect

Giuseppe Macri Tech Editor
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Verizon released the perfect response to the FCC’s Thursday passage of the most aggressive Internet regulations in history.

The telecommunications provider took advantage of “Throwback Thursday” — a social media hashtag used to denote old photographs shared online — to make a sarcastic political statement expressing its dissent with the FCC’s decision to regulate broadband Internet service providers like public utility telephone companies.

Thursday’s regulatory proposal is based on authority established in the 1930s to break up telephone monopolies by regulating them as public utilities. In “honor” of that history, Verizon published its response in old typewriter text, and dated it 1934. (RELATED: FCC Votes In Favor Of Net Neutrality)

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Verizon along with fellow ISPs, lobbyist groups, Republican lawmakers and FCC commissioners themselves have warned since the net neutrality debate began last year that such regulation, which is based in Title II of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, will have a negative impact on the expansion and advancement of broadband networks.

Thursday’s statement, which was originally released in Morse code, appears to echo the sentiment that by establishing government standards for content, speed and price, the FCC is destroying ISPs’ incentive to invest in their networks, which they argue will result in slower, less innovative networks over time.

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“FCC’s ‘Throwback Thursday’ move imposes 1930s rules on the Internet,” Verizon said in the statement. “The Federal Communications Commission approved an order urged by President Obama that imposes rules on broadband Internet services that were written in the era of the steam locomotive and the telegraph.”

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