cross-posted from: https://dubvee.org/post/205595
WASHINGTON, Sept 25 (Reuters) - U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel plans to begin an effort to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules rescinded under then-President Donald Trump, sources briefed on the matter said Monday.
The move comes after Democrats took majority control of the five-member FCC on Monday for the first time since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 when new FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was sworn in.
The FCC is set to take an initial vote on the net neutrality proposal in October, the sources added.
In July 2021, Biden signed an executive order encouraging the FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules adopted under Democratic then-President Barack Obama in 2015.
The FCC voted in 2017 to reverse the rules that barred internet service providers from blocking or throttling traffic, or offering paid fast lanes, also known as paid prioritization. Days before the 2020 presidential election, the FCC voted to maintain the reversal.
Rosenworcel denounced the repeal in 2017 saying it put the FCC "on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of the American public."
She plans a speech to outline her plans on Tuesday, the sources added. A spokesperson for Rosenworcel declined to comment.
In 2022, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 that the 2017 decision by the FCC to reverse federal net neutrality protections could not bar state action, rejecting a challenge from telecom and broad industry groups to block California's net neutrality law. Industry groups abandoned further legal challenges in May 2022.
The appeals court said that since the FCC reclassified internet services in 2017 as more lightly regulated information services, the commission "no longer has the authority to regulate in the same manner that it had when these services were classified as telecommunications services."
Days after Biden took office, the U.S. Justice Department withdrew its Trump-era legal challenge to California's state net neutrality law.
I'm mostly optimistic it'll be reinstated but remain concerned it'll be yanked away again.
That might be, but the tug back and forth at least gives the ISPs pause before going full bore into engineering (or contracting for) non-neutral arrangements. Why invest the time, money, and effort into something that is only sometimes legal?
That's a good point, but if the punishment for NN violation is less than the profit they make for violating it, it's just a cost of doing business.
I'm gonna push back against that defeatist attitude that things aren't worth doing if success can't be guaranteed. First off, as a general matter it's still doing because we don't want that one-way ratchet where only one side occasionally tries while the other will always bring their A game and pull off a few upsets, for an overall winning record. I think that most progressives/liberals are unnecessarily handicapping themselves by not showing up for every fight.
Second, specific to this type of regulation, the "cost of doing business" issue doesn't even really apply. If the punishment for violating a regulation is a fine, then maybe you pay a few fines and it works out. But that's not generally how the FCC works, because although they do have the power to issue fines, the big thing they have is the power to actually order compliance with their rules.
If the punishment for not building a house to code is a thousand dollars in fines, that's not going to stop home builders when they're making hundreds of thousands in profit per building. But if the punishment for not building a house to code is you're not allowed to sell it until you tear it down and do it right, well, then we're talking about a punishment that cuts hundreds of thousands of dollars into lost profits/revenue.
The FCC's regulations are more like that. If the FCC orders the ISPs that "oh that contract where you're accepting money in exchange for fast lane access is illegal, so you can't do that anymore," that now-illegal contract between two big businesses turns into a more complicated effort of lawyers figuring out what they're supposed to do. Does the other side still pay, if they're not getting anything in return? Or if the FCC says that a particular QoS rule on their routers needs to be removed, do the network engineers go back to the drawing board to implement their own traffic shaping stuff that does comply with the regs?
That's a fair point. It really feels like nothing is protected in perpetuity. It seems like everything is only protected for the time being. It honestly makes everything feel a little less stable, and I wish some protections could be codified to make them a little more robust.
That's what we get with the Republicans' hostage taking political strategy. True policy improvemants take around 30 years to enact, oversee, and reap the benefits from. Starting with Reagan, almost nothing ever gets seen through. Every politician is on a two year clock to block or pass enough bills to get funding to do it again. As an organism our country has ADHD
Guns. Only guns are protected in perpetuity. I'm by and large a pro gun person, but the reasonable ideas that get attacked because 2A means the right to be a dangerous idiot with a gun is absolutely sacrosanct makes me anti-2A. Don't take all the guns away, just allow sanity to prevail.
Of course the last thing I fucking want to see is a constitutional convention that could potentially fix it. That shit show would be utterly unhinged.
Not even the Constitution is immune to change or deletion, as you mentioned.
Democracy is hard. The natural state of government is dictatorship.
Multiple times since 2016 it has hit home like never before: anything related to freedom and democracy has to be continually fought for. When we stop being vigilant (say from 1974-2015) those that seek money and power above all else chip away at everything until they get it.