Complete Story
05/15/2017
NCTA survey: 61% of Americans support ‘net neutrality’
While the cable industry has staunchly supported rollback of the FCC’s Title II regulation regimen, its chief lobbying group released the results of a survey Thursday indicating that Americans are strongly in favor of some form of net neutrality regulation.
In fact, of the 2,194 registered U.S. voters polled by NCTA – The Internet & Television Association last month, 61% indicated either strong or moderate support for net neutrality, as defined by rules stipulating that internet service providers including “Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon, cannot block, throttle or prioritize certain content on the internet.”
Only 18% of voters oppose net neutrality. The full results of the survey can be found here (PDF).
Of course, it’s not necessarily what you ask U.S. voters, but how you ask them that counts. And that’s perhaps how a right-leaning special interest group like the NCTA is able to headline its press release promoting the survey with, “Majority of Americans Says Internet Should Be Lightly Regulated and Not a Public Utility, New Survey Reports.”
In other words, change the language of the questions that read, essentially, “should we protect consumers against large telecom companies” to “should the federal government regulate…,” and the answers are dramatically different.
