Net neutrality is dead again: US court says the FCC can't bring back Obama-era internet regulations
A US appeals court has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission does not have the authority to bring back net neutrality regulations, and has thus set aside the «Safeguarding Order» that would have restored them.
In its ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit declared that «broadband internet service providers offer only an 'information service'» as defined under current US law, «and therefore, the FCC lacks the statutory authority to impose its desired net-neutrality policies through the 'telecommunications service' provision of the Communications Act.»
The act also does not permit the FCC to classify mobile broadband as a «commercial mobile service,» which would have granted it the ability to impose net neutrality regulations on those services. «We therefore grant the petitions for review and set aside the FCC’s Safeguarding Order.»
Simply put, net neutrality requires that all traffic be treated equally: It forbids internet providers from, for instance, throttling traffic from competing services or prioritizing their own. As one hypothetical example, PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon said earlier this year that Comcast, which owns NBC Universal, could prioritize traffic to the Peacock streaming service while degrading the quality of Netflix—not something that's happened, to be clear, but in our current era of rampant corporate consolidation, not something beyond imagination either.
Net neutrality has been at the center of partisan politics in the US for years, but came into full force under new FCC rules introduced in 2015 under the Obama administration. Those rules were rolled back in 2017 by the Trump administration, in an effort spearheaded by then-chairman Ajit Pai; in 2021, current US President Joe Biden signed an executive order calling on the FCC to bring them back again. The FCC voted to do so in 2024.
While the FCC has faced down previous challenges to net neutrality regulations, it was stymied this time by the loss of "Chevron deference," which
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