The Federal Communications Commission will vote on restoring net neutrality later this month. It’s been a long time coming, but engadget.com notes it had to wait for Democrats to finally hold a majority on the Commission. A vote will fulfill an executive order from 2021 and bring back Obama era rules that the Trump administration FCC shredded in 2017. Net neutrality trades broadband services as an essential resource under Title II of the Communications Act, giving the FCC grater authority to regulate the industry.  It lets the agency prevent ISPs from anti-consumer behavior like unfair pricing, blocking or throttling content and providing pay-to-play “fast lanes” to internet access. I note that my provider 2 weeks ago voluntarily increased my upload and download speeds out of the goodness of its heart…that and the fact that new federal rules will not allow them to call it high speed broadband in their ads and promotion at the lower speeds! Republicans and Joe Manchin opposed Biden appointee Gigi Sohn to the Commission for 16 months. she withdrew, and Anna Gomez was sworn in last September, giving Democrats a majority.

Meta has had some issues yesterday and today. Yesterday, Threads wouldn’t allow uploads for several hours for some users. Today, WhatsApp and to a degree Messenger and Instagram, is facing outages and intermittent issues. According to techcrunch.com, Meta’s status page also shows disruptions to critical business services like Ads Manager, Messenger Platform, WhatsApp Business API, and others. WhatsApp confirmed the outage there on its X account, which must gall them. As of midday Wednesday, a number of users seemed to have services restored. Back on March 5th, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads all went down, so today’s outage is the second major one for Meta in a month.

The Apple Car may be gone, but something else is rolling out of the smoke from the Apple Car division….a robotics division. Appleinsider.com says Apple is working on a home robot…not just a vacuum, but an autonomous home robot companion for your home. This project is not close to completion, but involves a robot that would follow a user around the house. It might have issues with mine, as I have stairs, but perhaps they will give it a little rotor blade for folks like myself. The little robot will lean heavily on Apples AI, which they have called ‘machine learning’ until recently. Since we have robot vacuums that sweep and mop floors, and robot security guards, it will be interesting to see what Apple comes up with that people will really feel compelled to buy…at an Apple price!

Spotify is preparing to hike prices on some plans, and also thinking about adding new subscription options. 9to5google.com says the base US price is $11 a month for an individual Premium plan, and also the Duo plan that gives couples 2 accounts for $15 a month. Family Plan covers 6 users and is $17 a month. All those will change this month, as Spotify is raising prices about $2 across the board in the UK, Australia, Pakistan, and a couple un-named countries. The US account holders will get dinged for more money later this year. Meanwhile, the platform will introduce new Premium plans that are the same cost as the current ones, but won’t have the Audiobooks availability. How about the long promised Hi-Fi plan? Well that one is still in the works after 2 years…maybe due to cost.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.