FCC Makes Yet Another Push For Net Neutrality Rules

If at
first you don’t succeed, try and try again? That seems to be the
Federal Communications Commission’s approach when it comes to net
neutrality. Courts have nixed the agency’s previous net neutrality
rules twice already, but it’s going to try again,
according to The New York Times.

The proposals, to be introduced by Tom Wheeler, the chairman of
the commission, will also include measures that will seek to
prohibit Internet service providers from discriminating against any
providers of Internet content. A federal appeals
court ruled
last month that the F.C.C.’s previously carried out
Internet rules that illegally treated Internet service providers as
regulated utilities, or common carriers, such as telephone
service.

The court said that the F.C.C. did have authority to oversee
broadband service in ways that encouraged competition and the
expansion of broadband. Because that part of the ruling essentially
expanded the F.C.C.’s authority, the commission will not appeal the
ruling, handed down by the United States Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia.

 That last bit is important. Even though the most court
recent ruling struck down the FCC’s specific net neutrality
requirements, it also
gave the agency a lot more power over the Internet, saying that
under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, the agency does
have the power to promote and regulate broadband competition and
deployment. We’ll have to wait and see how the agency ends up using
its new powers, but they are potentially far-reaching. In a
dissenting opinion, Judge Laurence Silberman wrote that the
majority ruling “grant[s] the FCC virtually unlimited power to
regulate the Internet” by giving it the authority to put in place
“any regulation that, in the FCC’s judgment might arguably make the
Internet ‘better.’” The Internet becomes subject to the agency’s
easily politicized whims.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has said he wants to be careful about
how the agency uses the power conferred by the ruling. He isn’t,
for example, taking the more radical step of reclassifying Internet
services so that are subject to even stricter regulatory oversight.
But he is going forward with yet another plan to implement net
neutrality rules. And thanks to the court-granted expansion of the
agency’s authority, it’s a plan that might actually work.