Tech Innovation Group Proposes Internet Independence Day

A group of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) pioneers and other tech types opposed to the FCC's decision to reclassify ISPs under Title II, including computer entrepreneur Mark Cuban, has sent an open letter to Congress asking that it declare April 30 Internet Independence Day to mark the anniversary of the April 30, 1995 "birth" of the commercial Internet (which is the date of the "decommissioning of the NSFNET backbone," they say).

The self-dubbed "tech innovators" also want that to be the day Congress launches a bipartisan effort to preserve "the private sector framework of the Internet" by throwing Title II regs into the equivalent of Boston harbor.

In the letter, to the leaders of both parties in the House and Senate committees and subcommittees overseeing the FCC and communications, they slam the FCC's Title II reclassification as ending the "permissionless innovation" of the Internet, saying the FCC's "insertion of fiat regulatory powers will provide fatal to the entrepreneurial energies that built what chairman [Tom] Wheeler calls 'the most powerful network in the history of mankind.'"

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John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.