Dive Brief:
- Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter, as well as smaller tech companies, plan to work together Wednesday in an online "day of action" to protest the FCC's plan to abolish net neutrality rules, according to Recode.
- Protesting companies say they will direct visitors to the FCC so that they can file comments with the agency, while others will offer widgets or other tools users can download to display their support of net neutrality.
- FCC chairman Ajit Pai wants to abolish net neutrality rules that are in place to prevent companies from blocking or slowing down web content.
Dive Insight:
Pai already has the votes at the FCC to repeal the rule, but the comment period is open. The addition of Google and Facebook to the protest has the potential to make a difference. Those sites have billions of users and that many people are difficult to ignore.
From the FCC's vantage point, the fight is over, even though the comment period on proposed repeal of the rules goes until July 17, and will be followed by a second round that will go into August.
But with so much at stake, organizations which fear that internet providers could slow access to web content and make it more difficult to transfer large amounts of data, are gearing up for the next battleground — the courts.
