Ajit Pai promised that killing Net Neutrality would spur investment and improve service: a year later, service and investment have declined

A year ago, Trump FCC Chairman (and former Verizon exec) Ajit Pai killed Net Neutrality, leveraging illegal, fraudulent industry dirty tricks to ram his rule through the process; all along, he claimed that Net Neutrality was a drag on investment, competition and service improvements, and that Americans would see immediate benefits once he was done killing Net Neutrality.

It's been a year, and while Pai has touted major gains in broadboand investment, these were also a fraud, with the big telcos slashing investment, slashing jobs, sucking up massive tax subsidies (no, even more massive), while continuing to deliver the slowest, most expensive data in any developed country.

Veteran telcoms journalist Rob Rogoraro digs into Pai's claims in depth, finding them to be baseless: since the slaughter of Net Neutrality, investment and service are worse, and prices are higher.

Now, it's also true that the throttling and paid prioritization deals we worried about are also not in evidence, but as Karl Bode points out at Techdirt, that's likely because dozens of states' attorneys general are suing to the FCC to restore Net Neutrality, so any throttling/prioritization deals that the teclos struck would have to be unwound if the AGs prevailed (a ruling is expected any day now, and then it will likely head to the Supreme Court).

Gigi Sohn, a net-neutrality advocate who served as counselor to Tom Wheeler, Pai’s predecessor as FCC chairman, called throttling and paid prioritization “one half of the picture.”

She pointed to privacy issues, as seen in the discovery that all four wireless carriers—Yahoo Finance’s corporate parent Verizon (VZ) among them—had sold location data to third-party brokers.

The Obama-administration FCC had approved privacy regulations grounded in the old net-neutrality rules, but Republicans in Congress rushed to cancel them in early 2017.

“It’s a lack of oversight that’s the most egregious part,” Sohn said. “I doubt anybody’s minding the store.”

The FCC said repealing net-neutrality rules would help consumers: It hasn’t [Rob Pegoraro/Yahoo Finance]

None Of The Claimed Benefits Of Killing Net Neutrality Ever Arrived [Karl Bode/Techdirt]