Neutered: Federal court strikes down FCC authority to impose net neutrality rules

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Skye Jacobs

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What just happened? The net neutrality saga is effectively over following a federal appeals court ruling this week, unless Congress decides to revisit the debate. Given the current political climate, that seems improbable, and the Trump administration is unlikely to revive the cause.

The Federal Communications Commission's long-standing effort to establish stronger oversight of the internet was dealt a decisive blow this week when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to regulate wireless and home broadband services under the same set of rules that have traditionally governed telephone service.

The court's decision hinged on the recent Supreme Court ruling that overturned the Chevron deference, a precedent that had previously granted federal agencies significant leeway in interpreting ambiguous statutory language. This ruling significantly curtailed the FCC's ability to implement and enforce net neutrality regulations.

Net neutrality, a principle that advocates for equal treatment of all internet traffic, has been a contentious issue in American politics for over a decade. The concept aims to prevent internet service providers from favoring certain websites or services over others – a practice that could potentially stifle competition and innovation.

The Obama administration introduced robust net neutrality rules in 2015, which were subsequently repealed in 2017 under the Trump administration. In 2021, President Biden signed an executive order calling for the reinstatement of these regulations. The FCC, under the leadership of Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, voted to restore net neutrality rules in 2024.

The Sixth Circuit Court's decision effectively nullifies the FCC's Safeguarding Order, which would have reinstated net neutrality regulations. The court 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 net neutrality policies through the "telecommunications service" provision of the Communications Act.

Furthermore, the court ruled that the FCC cannot classify mobile broadband as a "commercial mobile service," which would have allowed the agency to impose net neutrality regulations on those services. The Sixth Circuit explicitly cited the absence of Chevron deference in its ruling, stating that they no longer afford deference to the FCC's interpretation of the statute.

In response to the court's decision, Rosenworcel called on Congress to enshrine net neutrality principles in federal law – an acknowledgment that the FCC's regulatory efforts have reached an impasse.

On the other hand, Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who is set to become the agency's chair later this month, praised the court's ruling. Carr criticized the Biden administration's approach, stating that their plan relied on "persuading Americans that the internet would break in the absence of these so-called 'net neutrality' regulations."

As for the future of net neutrality, the ball is now in Congress's court. However, given the current political landscape and the other pressing issues facing the government, it remains uncertain whether Congress will take up this challenge. With Carr poised to take the helm, it also seems unlikely that the agency will pursue further regulatory action on net neutrality.

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Neutered: Federal court strikes down FCC authority to impose net neutrality rules

 
Broadband "providers" must really be enjoying the fat profit margins from building private for-profit infrastucture using public money while simultaneously being told the public have no legal grounds to fairly access said infrastucture. What a time to be alive.
 
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Squashing agencies abilities to make law without Congress (and therefore any voter influence) is the only good way forward.

But it means Congress actually has to create laws again. And Congress has forgotten how to do that having ceded it to lobbyists and agencies decades ago.
 
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This should never have been something that was enacted by the FCC, they don’t have the legal right to do so. But you know who does? The FTC!!!
 
ScottSoapbox said:
Squashing agencies abilities to make law without Congress (and therefore any voter influence) is the only good way forward.

But it means Congress actually has to create laws again. And Congress has forgotten how to do that having ceded it to lobbyists and agencies decades ago.
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-I figure the whole point in the first place was to allow agencies to interpret badly written laws as a sort of punishment to Congress for writing bad laws but still allowing stuff to actually happen.

Congress is more than happy simply not caring and ceding more of their authority to the executive.

Now we both get bad laws and no one actually able to do anything about anything. Exactly what multinationals would want.
 
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GodisanAtheist said:
-I figure the whole point in the first place was to allow agencies to interpret badly written laws as a sort of punishment to Congress for writing bad laws but still allowing stuff to actually happen.
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That was the lazy Congressional idea, but the result was thousands of pages of new regulations every year without essentially any way to stop it as voters.

It's noteworthy that large companies like lots of regulations because they have the money to navigate them and/or buy off the government when they don't - but smaller businesses don't have the money. I.e., more regulations reduce current competition and discourage future (startup) competition.
 
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Zintin said:
As an American and gun owner myself. I have swayed more left than central these past couple years.
My perspective is that the "Right-wing" would shoot themselves in the foot with their own firearms and then blame the left for it.
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But they haven't? Hmm
The left blame the guns for getting up and firing themselves daily...
 
bandit8623 said:
I agree wouldn't it be nice to hold actual people accountable. Not just ban a device for being a gun?
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Ok man, but please hold back "the left is going to take your guns away" garbage.
After WW2, America was feeling good about themselves. And we all know the Republicans will not allow that for long. Even then they needed fear, and like today, a lie was the easiest way.
I think it was Republican candidate Thomas Dewey that first tried to tell them the Democrats would take away their guns. 7+ decades later and they still haven't tried, but CONservatives still make the claim every cycle! Though nobody but relatively few suckers on the right still believes and repeats it.
 
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trparky said:
This should never have been something that was enacted by the FCC, they don’t have the legal right to do so. But you know who does? The FTC!!!
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It's not simply the lack of authority, it's the fact that net neutrality is quite literally one of the dumbest ideas ever conceived by mankind. The idea that grandma's email recipes must be carried at the same ultra-high speed and low-latency as a brain surgeon's real-time commands for an emergency remote surgery is liberal sky-screaming at the rules of economics.
 
It doesn't take an engineering degree to understand that an isp connection is a telecommunications service, and an information service is something like Netflix, or Facebook, or whatever platform that uses a telecommunications service to transfer data over to and from the user. If and when information service providers and telecommunications service providers manage their traffic between them shaping the user experience for their own interests they break the neutrality, as they are expected to provide the best experience as possible for all and any use possible.
 
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Endymio said:
It's not simply the lack of authority, it's the fact that net neutrality is quite literally one of the dumbest ideas ever conceived by mankind. The idea that grandma's email recipes must be carried at the same ultra-high speed and low-latency as a brain surgeon's real-time commands for an emergency remote surgery is liberal sky-screaming at the rules of economics.
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Isn't about tech, is about politics. Telcos are public services and because of the need for them in the current world also are critical, so they are expected to behave not like regular business, but with stiffer regulation to warranty a level of quality of service to the users, imagine a power/energy service that favour that you use Samsung appliances rather than other brands at power level, so if your washing machine is from another brand receives less power from the grid, works worse, wears quickly, not because the appliance is worse, but because a public service provider (power) manipulates the service to favour a business partner, an appliance that isn't their property but yours. Now put it in the information services context, imagine that Comcast throttles traffic for Disney+ but let it run wide open for Netflix because they are partners, that's not technical, that's shady business, Comcast should give wide open capacity as best as possible for ABSOLUTELY ANY PLATFORM that the users wants to use, isn't their business to pick what should work better for you, their business is to hop you in the network as best as posible period.
 
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GodisanAtheist said:
-I figure the whole point in the first place was to allow agencies to interpret badly written laws as a sort of punishment to Congress for writing bad laws but still allowing stuff to actually happen.

Congress is more than happy simply not caring and ceding more of their authority to the executive.

Now we both get bad laws and no one actually able to do anything about anything. Exactly what multinationals would want.
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No--the Chevron doctrine was never about letting agencies "make law." At least, not any more than the courts are making law.

The doctrine encouraged courts to defer to agencies with delegated rule-making authority when their rules were premised on a permissible interpretation of the law.

The intent was to recognize that the whole point of legislatively delegating rule-making authority to administrative agencies is to make those agencies, not the courts, principally responsible for resolving questions about how policy mandates broadly defined law should be applied under the particular circumstances that actually arise.

Consider how "rules" governing the application of laws are worked out in the absence of administrative agencies with delegated rulemaking authority: people sue and courts decide what seems like the most reasonable rule or interpretation. Once a precedent is established, other courts are generally supposed to defer to that precedent--overturning it only if it's a clearly incorrect interpretation of the law, and not simply because a reviewing judge has a different policy preference.

If legislatively delegating rule-making authority is to mean anything at all, it must mean that courts give those agency determinations at least the same weight as judicial precedents. I.e., if they are based on permissible interpretations of the law, then courts should not arbitrarily overturn them simply because the judge reviewing the decision has a different policy preference. Notably, that still leaves courts plenty of room to decide that unreasonable interpretations of the law are impermissible--it just protects agency power to make policy decisions on the basis of reasonable interpretations of the laws. Overturning the Chevron doctrine was a usurpation of delegated rule-making authority by the courts; without a mandate to defer to reasonable agency interpretations, judges can just substitute their own policy preferences for agency rules.
 
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poshflamingos said:
Every democratic country on the planet has a constitution, genius.
Don't tell me americans are so deluded you actually think having a constitution is something unique to the United States lmao
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Now we know you who you really are ..

No, not every country has a written constitution:

  • Countries without a written constitution
    Israel, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom do not have a single written constitution. Instead, they have a series of laws, legal traditions, and "basic laws" that establish fundamental principles for governance.

  • Countries with constitutions
    Most countries have a written constitution that outlines the basic institutions of government, how they operate, and how to enforce and change the constitutional rules. The United States, Australia, China, and India are examples of countries with written constitutions.
Some countries use the term "basic law" instead of "constitution". For example, Oman and Saudi Arabia use this term.
 
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bandit8623 said:
Countries without a written constitution
Canada, Israel, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom do not have a single written constitution. Instead, they have a series of laws, legal traditions, and "basic laws" that establish fundamental principles for governance.
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🤦‍♂️
That's still a constitution. Just because some countries haven't condensed theirs into one single document doesn't mean it stops being a constitution. For example, the UK government itself refers to the british constitution.
 
poshflamingos said:
Every democratic country on the planet has a constitution, genius.
Don't tell me americans are so deluded you actually think having a constitution is something unique to the United States lmao
Click to expand...
There's kind of a semantic issue here in the use of the term "constitution."

In a very broad sense, "constitution" can refer to any foundational body of law. I.e., the body of law from which the state is 'constituted.' In that very broad sense, all rule-of-law states could be regarded as "constitutional."

E.g., the UK is a "constitutional monarchy." However, the UK does not have a "constitution" in the sense in which Americans generally use the them. I.e., a single unitary document defining the basic organizing laws of the government, and which is somewhat protected from arbitrary revisions by narrow majorities.

Notably, the US federal system really is supposed to be different from a system like the UK's in a pretty fundamental way that is based on the existence of that basic written law. The UK has a common law system--so, judges rely heavily on a long history of precedents, and there are crimes that you can be charged with and convicted of on the basis of tradition and judge-made law rather than legislation. Judges traditionally created law 'from whole cloth,' without requiring any statutory authority, and that law is an element of the UK's "constitution, " which is not formalized in any single document.

The US federal system is at least ostensibly a system of statutory law, in which the constitution is the ultimate controlling law. So, if we didn't have a federal law on the books prohibiting murder, for example, a federal judge would have no basis for convicting or punishing someone for murder-- despite a long tradition of murder being generally regarded as unlawful. There's still precedent in the system, but it's all supposed to be based on the interpretation and application of written laws.

Of course, some US states have common-law systems, and there is plenty of judge-created law in the federal system. But that's at least supposed to be a no-no, and when our Supreme Court wants to invent new law they always at least pretend they found it in the constitution (although the "history and tradition" test they recently invented comes pretty close to just saying "actually it's common law now"). Also, while it's difficult to amend the constitution, it's pretty clear that installing a politically motivated Court can have a substantially similar impact by producing "interpretations" that write new rules into the constitution. E.g., the recently-invented doctrine of presidential immunity is not based on the text of the constitution, but on the policy preferences of the Court.

I've used the UK as an example here, but there are plenty of other democratic states that either don't have a single written constitution or don't have one that exactly matches the sense in which the term is generally used in the US. E.g., Israel has a "basic law" that is frequently described as its "Constitution," but most of its clauses can be amended by a simple majority vote of the knesset-- so from a US perspective, it look a bit more like a regular old statute than a constitution.
 
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EstimatedProphet said:
There's kind of a semantic issue here in the use of the term "constitution."

In a very broad sense, "constitution" can refer to any foundational body of law. I.e., the body of law from which the state is 'constituted.' In that very broad sense, all rule-of-law states could be regarded as "constitutional."

E.g., the UK is a "constitutional monarchy." However, the UK does not have a "constitution" in the sense in which Americans generally use the them. I.e., a single unitary document defining the basic organizing laws of the government, and which is somewhat protected from arbitrary revisions by narrow majorities.

Notably, the US federal system really is supposed to be different from a system like the UK's in a pretty fundamental way that is based on the existence of that basic written law. The UK has a common law system--so, judges rely heavily on a long history of precedents, and there are crimes that you can be charged with and convicted of on the basis of tradition and judge-made law rather than legislation. Judges traditionally created law 'from whole cloth,' without requiring any statutory authority, and that law is an element of the UK's "constitution, " which is not formalized in any single document.

The US federal system is at least ostensibly a system of statutory law, in which the constitution is the ultimate controlling law. So, if we didn't have a federal law on the books prohibiting murder, for example, a federal judge would have no basis for convicting or punishing someone for murder-- despite a long tradition of murder being generally regarded as unlawful. There's still precedent in the system, but it's all supposed to be based on the interpretation and application of written laws.

Of course, some US states have common-law systems, and there is plenty of judge-created law in the federal system. But that's at least supposed to be a no-no, and when our Supreme Court wants to invent new law they always at least pretend they found it in the constitution (although the "history and tradition" test they recently invented comes pretty close to just saying "actually it's common law now"). Also, while it's difficult to amend the constitution, it's pretty clear that installing a politically motivated Court can have a substantially similar impact by producing "interpretations" that write new rules into the constitution. E.g., the recently-invented doctrine of presidential immunity is not based on the text of the constitution, but on the policy preferences of the Court.

I've used the UK as an example here, but there are plenty of other democratic states that either don't have a single written constitution or don't have one that exactly matches the sense in which the term is generally used in the US. E.g., Israel has a "basic law" that is frequently described as its "Constitution," but most of its clauses can be amended by a simple majority vote of the knesset-- so from a US perspective, it look a bit more like a regular old statute than a constitution.
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Brotha, you're writing six whole paragraphs to make a completely meaningless argument about the semantics of the word "constitution", in a desperate attempt to not have to admit you were wrong. You already lost.
 
poshflamingos said:
Brotha, you're writing six whole paragraphs to make a completely meaningless argument about the semantics of the word "constitution", in a desperate attempt to not have to admit you were wrong. You already lost.
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Words have meaning. That's why they exist.. you are wrong not every country has a constitution.
Laws upholding Rights are not even close to a document called a constitution to uphold rights. A constitution has many more steps to be changed vs a law. That's why it matters..
 
bandit8623 said:
Words have meaning.
Click to expand...
They do. And you clearly do not understand the meaning of "constitution".

That's why they exist.. you are wrong not every country has a constitution.
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Every single democratic country in this planet has a constitution. No exceptions. Hell, even some non-democratic countries (like China) still do have a constitution.

Laws upholding Rights are not even close to a document called a constitution to uphold rights.
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Constitution is not a document. Constitution is simply the principles that form the legal basis of a country. It's often codified in one document, but doesn't have to be, and not every country has their constitution structured that way.
But even if you were to incorrectly think of constitutions as having to be one single document, the vast majority of democratic countries do have their constitutions codified in one document. You'd have to be incredibly ignorant to think that's something unique to the United States.

A constitution has many more steps to be changed vs a law. That's why it matters..
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Moot point, because once again, every single democratic country in this planet has a constitution.
 
poshflamingos said:
They do. And you clearly do not understand the meaning of "constitution".


Every single democratic country in this planet has a constitution. No exceptions. Hell, even some non-democratic countries (like China) still do have a constitution.


Constitution is not a document. Constitution is simply the principles that form the legal basis of a country. It's often codified in one document, but doesn't have to be, and not every country has their constitution structured that way.
But even if you were to incorrectly think of constitutions as having to be one single document, the vast majority of democratic countries do have their constitutions codified in one document. You'd have to be incredibly ignorant to think that's something unique to the United States.


Moot point, because once again, every single democratic country in this planet has a constitution.
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Look up the oldest constitution in the world... Why doesn't that list countries that have been around longer than the USA? It's probably because not all countries have constitutions....
 
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