FCC approves net neutrality

The U.S.’s top Internet overseer today voted to bar Internet providers from charging some companies more than others for faster delivery of movies, music and other web content.

The historic vote is a huge defeat to the giant telecommunications companies, which are among the most powerful special interests in Washington, D.C., and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying, political giving and influence campaigns over the past several years to fight net neutrality.

“This is, overwhelmingly, the biggest defeat for vested interests I can recall in my 15 years working in this sector,” Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group in Washington that supported net neutrality, said in an email. “It is a thing that should not be possible, and which therefore nobody but a handful of us believed could happen.”

Last year, the biggest broadband providers and associations that represent them spent $88 million alone on lobbying Congress and federal agencies on all kinds of issues, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

AT&T and Verizon have said they will sue to overturn the ruling.

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This story is part of Broadband. Investigating the political power of the information technology industry. Click here to read more stories in this investigation.

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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.