You’ll have two extra weeks to file your thoughts with the FCC on its plan to get rid of net neutrality. The proposal’s comment period was originally scheduled to end next week, on August 16th, but the commission just pushed the date out to August 30th.
FCC extends net neutrality comment period by two weeks
It now ends August 30th
It now ends August 30th
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
is The Verge’s executive editor. He has covered tech, policy, and online creators for over a decade.
The extension was granted in response to 10 groups asking for more time to respond. They had been looking for an additional eight weeks, but the commission said an additional two weeks would be more in line with the type of extensions granted in the past.
The commission didn’t signal that disruptions to its filing system, caused by an apparent DDOS attack, factored into the decision at all.
Granting a two week extension gives people more time to file “reply comments,” which are meant to respond to what people filed during the first phase of the comment period, which closed in July. That comment period had been much longer than usual, because the commission released the proposal a month before it was voted on.
Even without these two extra weeks, the proposal to end Title II net neutrality was already the most-commented item in the FCC’s history: there are currently close to 20 million filings. For comparison, the last net neutrality debate — the proposal to create net neutrality rules and enact Title II — had just 3.7 million replies.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
