Maine joins fight for net neutrality

Maine Public Broadcasting - Maine Attorney General Janet Mills says her office will join the multistate lawsuit seeking to reverse a recent decision by the Federal Communications Commission to eliminate net neutrality rules. Mills says the suit will be aimed both at the procedure used by the FCC to roll back the 2015 rules, as well as the substance of the rules, which she says set up a toll highway compared to the current freeway approach. “It’s like taking way the pulpit — the soap box — at Hyde Park, saying you can no longer speak, or if you do speak we’re going to charge you. It’s a toll road kind of concept instead of an open highway,” she says. Mills says bogus public comments were filed with the FCC, faulting the agency’s process. She says Maine residents have contacted her to say their names were used without permission. “It’s kind of bizarre and unprecedented that anybody would fake two million names to file comments of a fictitious nature in support of the rollback of any rule in any agency,” she says.