A U.S. appeals court yesterday upheld landmark federal rules preventing internet service providers from obstructing or slowing down consumer access to web content (via Reuters).
The backing for the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules came in a 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The outcome reaffirms the law enforced last year that says ISPs must treat all internet traffic equally.
The rules prohibit broadband providers from giving or selling access to faster internet lanes for specific internet services, which the FCC claims will help protect freedom of expression and innovation on the internet.
The court also rejected legal arguments from telecommunications industry groups that the rules should not apply to mobile phone web use or that they violated the constitutional free-speech rights of internet service providers.
The court's decision in favor of the FCC means that it too considered the internet to be a public utility, and therefore subject to government regulations. White House spokesman Josh Earnest called the ruling "a victory for the open, fair, and free internet as we know it today," and one that barred service providers from becoming "paid gatekeepers".
The outcome will also be seen as a personal victory for President Barack Obama, who is a strong advocate of net neutrality rules, although ISPs have already said they plan to appeal to either the full appellate court or the Supreme Court over the ruling. Telecoms industry groups have also said they will continue with efforts to get Congress to limit the FCC's authority.
Netflix and Twitter were among the companies that praised the ruling, while Google and others have backed the rules. Democrats in Congress also lauded the decision to back the FCC rules, which have been in place since June 2015.
However, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce business group accused the FCC of "essentially transforming an entire industry... from an innovative, lightly regulated enterprise that made huge investments into this country, into a public utility subject to the whims of regulators."
South Dakota Republican John Thune, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, said the decision upholds FCC restrictions "designed for the monopoly-telephone era" and asked the Republican-led Congress to step in to overturn a decision that results in "a highly political agency micromanaging the internet ecosystem."
US Telecom, the telecommunications industry trade association that led the legal challenge, said the court failed to recognize "the significant legal failings" of the FCC rules that "we believe will replace a consumer-driven internet with a government-run internet, threatening innovation and investment in years to come."
But FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler called the ruling "a victory for consumers and innovators who deserve unfettered access to the entire web" and claimed that it would ensure the internet remained "a platform for unparalleled innovation, free expression and economic growth."
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Top Rated Comments
Glassed Silver:mac
If I buy 50/10 up/down service, then I get that speed regardless of what the data is or where it is from.
edit: oh hell, you won't reply. You never do. But for the benefit of people who don't assume everything's a conspiracy, and the government is always out to get them, this is the very digest version of how we got to this point.
Up until about 2006, all ISPs were classified under the Title II Communications Act as Communication Services, which had some fairly strict guidelines that had to be followed. Since the internet was primarily a telephone service, and telephone itself had been Title II'd since the 30's, it was only natural it inherited the same classification.
This changed around 2006 or so, when the FCC classified ISPs under the far less strict Information Services guidelines. This gave them a lot more freedom, and did grow the market a bit, but there was always one stipulation: that they had to adhere to net neutrality standards.
This worked just fine up until Netflix hit it big, and they, Verizon, and Comcast got into a big fight over bandwidth, and who owed what to whom for what, and blah blah blah. It eventually lead to Comcast throttling Netflix traffic over their network.
So some other things happened, people got sued, and Verizon (I believe, it's been a bit since I last read about this) took the FCC to court, saying they couldn't enforce net neutrality on them, since they were classified as Information Services. The courts agreed, saying that if the FCC wanted to do that, they'd have to reclassify them as Communications Services again.
...which the FCC did. This, rather amusingly, ended up getting a lot of the other big ISPs and telcos ticked off at Verizon, since their little legal gambit ended up with them pissing in everyone's cereal. Being reclassified put them under those stricter guidelines again. In the meantime, the FCC wrote new guidelines detailing exactly what net neutrality is. Despite the fact it been claimed that it was all done in secret, and blah blah blah, it was actual an open process, with close to a million people, from companies like Google all the way down to web designers, contributing to it. The end result was a, I think, 10 page guideline that can be summed up as "don't **** with the internet".
It can be summed up under the brightlines rules...
Now here we are. People are now screaming about government overstepping it's boundaries because the FCC is doing the job it's always done for the last 80 years.