The death of Net Neutrality is a bad thing
The Seventh Circuit of the FCC Appeals ruled that net neutrality would never be violated by the Federal Communications Commission, even after the Trump Administration
Net neutrality was already in danger, even before this ruling came out — in a suit filed against the FCC by broadband industry associations. The net neutrality rules were already blocked by the appeals court. During oral arguments in October, the three Republican-appointed judges prodded attorneys about the correct interpretation of the Communications Act and about deference to agency expertise. With President-elect Donald Trump — under whom net neutrality was previously repealed — due to take office in mere weeks, this could be the last we hear about the attempt to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers for a while.
The judges were free to wax about the differences between more heavily regulated telecommunications services and less heavily regulated ones. “The existence of a fact or a thought in one’s mind is not ‘information’ like 0s and 1s used by computers,” one part of the ruling reads. It asserts that writing and speaking reduces thought to sound, and that the telephone service merely transmits the audio information that a speaker creates during a phone call.
It’s easy to get lost in the technicalities of net neutrality, but the basic thing the Federal Communications Commission wanted was the power to prevent broadband providers from engaging in bandwidth discrimination, slowing speeds for certain customers or to certain sites. The Obama administration had these protections but they were rolled back by the Trump administration. You probably won’t feel much near-term impact; we’re largely back to the status quo, and Spectrum is unlikely to immediately try slowing down YouTube to get you to watch its own cable news channels. It is possible that the way the Sixth Circuit arrived at its decision is more alarming than the ruling itself.
“Unlike past challenges that the DC Circuit considered under Chevron, we no longer afford deference to the FCC’s reading of the statute,” the ruling reads. We need to decide the best reading of the statute in the first instance.
Evan Greer, the director of Fight for the Future, says it is a sad day for democracy when corporations can get judges to overturn popular consumer protection rules. This is an alarming example of industry-friendly rulings to come.
The Bergmayer Hypothesis in the Wary of the Administrative State: Is Congress gonna pass a law-enforcement bill?
Bergmayer thinks Congress can pass a bill that would allow agencies to interpret laws. That seems unlikely, though, in a GOP-led legislature that’s wary of—or outright hostile toward—the administrative state.