Today the D.C. Circuit struck down most of the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet Order, rejecting rules that required broadband providers to carry all traffic for edge providers (“anti-blocking”) and prevented providers from negotiating deals for prioritized carriage. However, the appeals court did conclude that the FCC has statutory authority to issue “Net Neutrality” rules under Section 706(a) and let stand the FCC’s requirement that broadband providers clearly disclose their network management practices.
The following statement may be attributed to Geoffrey Manne and Berin Szoka:
The FCC may have lost today’s battle, but it just won the war over regulating the Internet. By recognizing Section 706 as an independent grant of statutory authority, the court has given the FCC near limitless power to regulate not just broadband, but the Internet itself, as Judge Silberman recognized in his dissent.
The court left the door open for the FCC to write new Net Neutrality rules, provided the Commission doesn’t treat broadband providers as common carriers. This means that, even without reclassifying broadband as a Title II service, the FCC could require that any deals between broadband and content providers be reasonable and non-discriminatory, just as it has required wireless carriers to provide data roaming services to their competitors’ customers on that basis. In principle, this might be a sound approach, if the rule resembles antitrust standards. But even that limitation could easily be evaded if the FCC regulates through case-by-case enforcement actions, as it tried to do before issuing the Open Internet Order. Either way, the FCC need only make a colorable argument under Section 706 that its actions are designed to “encourage the deployment… of advanced telecommunications services.” If the FCC’s tenuous “triple cushion shot” argument could satisfy that test, there is little limit to the deference the FCC will receive.
But that’s just for Net Neutrality. Section 706 covers “advanced telecommunications,” which seems to include any information service, from broadband to the interconnectivity of smart appliances like washing machines and home thermostats. If the court’s ruling on Section 706 is really as broad as it sounds, and as the dissent fears, the FCC just acquired wide authority over these, as well — in short, the entire Internet, including the “Internet of Things.” While the court’s “no common carrier rules” limitation is a real one, the FCC clearly just gained enormous power that it didn’t have before today’s ruling.
Today’s decision essentially rewrites the Communications Act in a way that will, ironically, do the opposite of what the FCC claims: hurt, not help, deployment of new Internet services. Whatever the FCC’s role ought to be, such decisions should be up to our elected representatives, not three unelected FCC Commissioners. So if there’s a silver lining in any of this, it may be that the true implications of today’s decision are so radical that Congress finally writes a new Communications Act — a long-overdue process Congressmen Fred Upton and Greg Walden have recently begun.
Szoka and Manne are available for comment at media@techfreedom.org. Find/share this release on Facebook or Twitter.