America's Internet Freedom Rating Dropped Due to the Repeal of Net Neutrality

November 2, 2018

A prominent non-profit has decreased the US’s internet freedom rating for 2018 due to the repeal of net neutrality. Freedom House, a US-based pro-democracy think tank, releases an annual report that analyzes the amount of internet freedom in countries around the world, and assigns a score to each country. While America still has a high level of internet freedom, the loss of net neutrality protections, privacy laws, and the merging of major telecom companies caused its rating to drop this year over last year.

“It is depressing but not unexpected,” Josh Tabish the Ford/MDF Technology Exchange Fellow at Fight for the Future, an internet freedom advocacy group, told me over the phone. “In terms of internet freedom, this current congress has been one of the most dangerous that the country has maybe ever seen.”

Freedom House rates each country’s internet freedom based on factors that include obstacles to access, limits to content, and violations of user rights, then uses that to assign a rating out of 100. The more of each kind of limits a country has, the higher the rating is—so a high rating is bad, it means you have a lot of things blocking internet freedom. Russia, for example, got a rating of 67 this year. China scored an 88. Both Italy and France got ratings of 25, while Iceland had an impressive 6. The United States’ internet freedom rating changed from 21 in 2017 to 22 in 2018.

Read more at Vice

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