Legal challenges ahead as US regulator nixes net neutrality
‘NOT OVER YET’ FCC votes 32 on rollback as several states, organisations declare they will fight on
WASHINGTON: While the White House expectedly welcomed the voting down of net neutrality rules by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the decision appeared headed for legal challenges, with several US states and organisations announcing plans to go to court within hours.
New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has announced he will lead a multistate lawsuit against the vote that “gave big telecom an early Christmas present” and “will give ISPS (Internet Service Providers) new ways to control what we see, what we do, and what we say online”.
Washington state, which has said it will enforce net neutrality on ISPS operating within its boundaries through other means, will also sue, and that should be a matter of concern for the successful challenge it mounted against President Donald Trump’s original travel ban, and getting it stayed twice.
The Internet Association, a Washington-based trade body representing Google, Facebook and other IT companies, said the rollback was a “departure from more than a decade of broad, bipartisan consensus on the rules governing the internet” and that it was weighing legal options in a lawsuit.
The American Civil Liberties Union also plans to go to court.
Trump’s press secretary Sarah Sanders welcomed the rollback of what she described were “burdensome regulations” at the White House press briefing shortly after the vote on Thursday.
Voting along party lines, the five-member FCC voted 3-2 to roll back an Obama-era regulation that prevented ISPS such as AT&T, Comcast, Cox and Verizon from speeding up, slowing or throttling net access, in a public hearing interrupted briefly by a security threat.
“We are helping consumers and promoting competition,” FCC chairman Ajit Pai said before the vote. “Broadband providers will have more incentive to build networks, especially to underserved areas.”
He had announced plans to overturn the regulation i n November, inviting comments and debate.
The debate that ensued was acrimonious and in Pai’s case, personal, with net neutrality activists naming his children on placards hung near his home. The chairman, an Indian American, also faced racially charged attacks from critics within his own community.
Pai, a long-time opponent of net neutrality who voted against the 2015 regulation, favours a “light-touch” approach to regulation, and believes ISPS will not speed up or slow down net access depending on who pays and who doesn’t — called paid prioritisation. And the Federal Trade Commission, the regulator that keeps the market free and fair, will keep them in line.
Broadband for America, a group representing telecom industry groups and companies such as AT&T Inc, and Comcast Corp., sought to assure consumers in an ad recently that it would preserve an “open internet” and would not block legal content and or throttle data speed — but it did not mention paid prioritisation.
Net neutrality is not history in the United States, not yet. As the Internet Association said in the statement, “The fight isn’t over.”