President Joe Biden has renominated Gigi Sohn to fill the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) now-vacant fifth seat. This is the third time Sohn has been nominated. Should she gain the Senate's approval, she will break the agency's current 2–2 Democrat-Republican logjam and allow the agency to re-enact Obama-era net neutrality regulations, which are economically nonsensical and largely unnecessary.
The FCC's 2015 regulations forbade internet service providers from blocking content or discriminatorily slowing specific content and banned the practice of paid prioritization—i.e., a company paying an internet service provider (ISP) to favor its content. Left unregulated, Sohn and other proponents insist, greedy ISPs would create a two-tier internet that benefits the rich and powerful to the detriment of everyday internet users. The FCC rolled back its net neutrality regulations in 2017, and the two-tiered hellscape Sohn predicted has yet to materialize. On the contrary, today's median download speed for fixed broadband is nearly 200 megabits per second; in 2015, the average speed was just 55 Mbps.
