FCC Prepares to Take Another Swing at Writing Net-Neutrality Rules
One of Washington’s longest-running tech-policy time loops just got reset: The FCC will move to write net-neutrality regulations, six years after prior leadership at the agency scrapped the net-neutrality rules that it were enacted two years before.
"Internet access should be more than just accessible and affordable; the internet also needs to be open," FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a speech at the National Press Club.
Under her proposal, the FCC will return to regulating internet providers under the “Title II” common-carrier provision of the Telecommunications Act of 1934, the same basis it had chosen in its 2015 vote that led to rules banning ISPs from blocking or slowing specific types of legal traffic or charging sites or apps extra to prioritize their data.
The FCC took that step because prior steps to write net-neutrality rules on a different title in the Telecom Act governing “information services” had been rejected by courts every time telecom firms sued to overturn them.
The Title II-based rules finally survived judicial scrutiny. But they didn’t survive the election of President Trump. His choice of Ajit Pai to head the FCC led to the commission not only hitting the “undo” key on the 2015 rules but giving up on regulating broadband providers in a move that Pai justified with a series of dubious revisionist-history arguments and which left it to the Federal Trade Commission to police cases of abusive conduct.
(Some states, such as California, adopted their own net-neutrality laws or policies after Pai’s FCC walked away.)
“I believe this repeal of net neutrality put the agency on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law and the wrong side of the American public,” Rosenworcel said in her
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