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Tag: net neutrality

  • Trump FCC Pick Brendan Carr Wants to Be the Speech Police. That’s Not His Job

    Trump FCC Pick Brendan Carr Wants to Be the Speech Police. That’s Not His Job

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    “What he can do and wants to do is use his bully pulpit to bully companies that moderate content in a way he doesn’t like,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. “And if he continues to do that, he’s very likely to run smack into the First Amendment, which, contrary to misconception, is the real thing that protects online speech.” Section 230 protects social media companies from being sued over the content users post on their platforms, while the First Amendment explicitly bars the government from interfering in someone’s ability to exercise free speech. Over the summer, the Supreme Court ruled that a company’s moderation decisions are protected under the First Amendment.

    As for Section 230, the Supreme Court may have just made it more difficult for administrative agencies like the FCC to reinterpret it to their liking. Over the summer, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), a decision that had allowed for government agencies to independently interpret their authorities. With the Chevron deference made mute, it could be an uphill battle for the FCC to make its own interpretations of the law.

    “Agencies are basically losing the ability to interpret how they can enforce when language is vague in the statute,” says Lewis. “Section 230’s language is actually very short and very straightforward and has no FCC action attached to it.” If Carr decided to issue a rule modifying Section 230, it would likely be met with legal challenges. Still, Republicans currently control all three branches of government and could either rule in the administration’s favor or pass new legislation putting the FCC as the top cop on the beat.

    Trump has tried to deputize the FCC into policing online speech before. In 2020, Trump signed an executive order instructing the FCC to begin a rule-making process to reinterpret when Section 230 would apply to social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The Center for Democracy and Technology, which receives funding from big tech companies, challenged the order as unconstitutional, saying that it unfairly punished X, then known as Twitter, “to chill the constitutionally protected speech of all online platforms and individuals.”

    Months later, the FCC general counsel Tom Johnson published a blog post arguing that the agency has the authority to reinterpret the foundational internet law. A few days after that, then-FCC chairman Ajit Pai announced that the agency would move forward on a rule-making process, but no rule was ordered before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, giving Democrats control over agency decisions.

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  • FCC Closes ‘Fast Lane’ Loophole in Final Net Neutrality Order

    FCC Closes ‘Fast Lane’ Loophole in Final Net Neutrality Order

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    The Federal Communications Commission released its final net neutrality order on Tuesday, and it includes a few edits to the draft version ensuring that internet service providers can’t sneakily violate fast-lane bans.

    Speaking to WIRED on Tuesday, a senior FCC official said that the final net neutrality order has been updated to ensure that paid fast lanes in consumer-facing products violate the agency’s rules. The official also said that providers couldn’t mask consumer products as enterprise ones to skirt the rules, either.

    In April, the FCC reinstated net neutrality rules that would reclassify broadband, once again, as a “common carrier” service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. By reinstating net neutrality, the agency can prevent internet service providers, like AT&T and Verizon, from blocking, throttling, or offering pay to play fast lanes to online services.

    But many critics feared the draft rules were outdated and didn’t account for new developments in technologies like 5G and, more specifically, “network slicing.” Telecom executives have argued that network slicing, or the act of chopping a network into several smaller ones that vary in speed, should be exempt from rules banning paid fast-lanes.

    Many industries and products, like autonomous vehicles and remote surgery equipment, are expected to run on network slicing. The difference, however, is that many of these products are enterprise uses of slicing, and not products marketed to consumers like their in-home internet packages.

    “The FCC has said that if a provider was taking steps that looked like it was being done to avoid the compliance of net neutrality requirements, that could be a violation of the net neutrality requirements,” Greg Guice, former director of government affairs at Public Knowledge, said in an interview on Tuesday. “So in other words, you couldn’t design your service to try to get around the obligations that you have.”

    Changes to the final order also address concerns that the FCC’s rules could preempt state-led broadband affordability programs.

    Late last month, a federal appeals court reversed a ruling that barred the state of New York from enforcing its own law requiring broadband providers to offer low-cost programs. The New York law requires ISPs to offer 25Mbps service for no more than $15 per month, or 200Mbps for $20 per month. On Tuesday, the FCC confirmed that its rules wouldn’t get in the way of New York’s program or others like it in the future.

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  • Net Neutrality Returns to a Very Different Internet

    Net Neutrality Returns to a Very Different Internet

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    The Federal Communications Commission has voted—once again—to assert its power to oversee and regulate the activities of the broadband industry in the United States. In a 3-2 vote, the agency reinstated net neutrality rules that had been abandoned during the height of the Trump administration’s deregulatory blitz.

    “Broadband is now an essential service,” FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said Thursday in prepared remarks. “Essential services—the ones we count on in every aspect of modern life—have some basic oversight.”

    The rules approved by the agency on Thursday will reclassify broadband services in the United States once more as “common carriers” under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, subjecting broadband to the same public-utilities-style scrutiny as telephone networks and cable TV.

    That distinction means that the agency can prevent internet service providers from blocking or throttling legal content, or letting online services pay ISPs to prioritize their content with faster delivery speeds. But it’s difficult, particularly in an election year, to say whether net neutrality is here to stay or whether the FCC’s vote is just another inflection point in a regulatory forever-war.

    “Net neutrality rules protect internet openness by prohibiting broadband providers from playing favorites with internet traffic,” Rosenworcel says. “We need broadband to reach 100 percent of us—and we need it fast, open, and fair.”

    This reclassification was first attempted by the Obama administration following a lawsuit by Verizon in 2011; the ruling pointed to reclassification as a necessary hurdle in efforts to bring broadband under scope of the FCC’s oversight. The outcome of that case prompted the introduction of the Open Internet Order of 2015, which not only reclassified the industry in line with the court’s suggestion but imposed a slate of new rules with “net neutrality” serving as the FCC’s guiding philosophy.

    Two years later, those rules were overturned by the Trump-appointed FCC chair at the time, Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer. Back in the private sector now, Pai derided the FCC’s efforts this week as a “complete waste of time;” something, he said, “nobody actually cares about.”

    The rules put forth under Rosenworcel are somewhat different than those previously introduced. Past FCC orders pursing net neutrality have been repeatedly challenged in court, giving the agency today a fair idea of which policies will be defensible in the onslaught of lawsuits definitely to come.

    Though banning the creation of “pay-to-play internet fast lanes” remains a priority, the reasons for reclassifying broadband are not limited to warding off the industry’s well-documented predatory practices. The new order also gives the FCC the ability to more closely examine industry behavior; how, for instance, companies respond (or fail to) in the event of widespread network outages.

    “Net neutrality” was not originally devised as a set of rules, but a principle by which regulators seek to strike a balance between the profit-motivated interests of megalithic broadband companies and the rights and welfare of consumers. It is often summed up simply as the practice of ensuring that “all internet, regardless of its source, must be treated the same.”

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