ICLE and leading academics file amicus brief urging the court to overturn the FCC’s illegal net neutrality order

Cite this Article
Geoffrey A. Manne, ICLE and leading academics file amicus brief urging the court to overturn the FCC’s illegal net neutrality order, Truth on the Market (August 07, 2015), https://truthonthemarket.com/2015/08/07/icle-and-leading-academics-file-amicus-brief-urging-court-to-overturn-net-neutrality-order/

Yesterday, the International Center for Law & Economics, together with Professor Gus Hurwitz, Nebraska College of Law, and nine other scholars of law and economics, filed an amicus brief in the DC Circuit explaining why the court should vacate the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order.

A few key points from ICLE’s brief follow, but you can read a longer summary of the brief here.

If the 2010 Order was a limited incursion into neighboring territory, the 2015 Order represents the outright colonization of a foreign land, extending FCC control over the Internet far beyond what the Telecommunications Act authorizes.

The Commission asserts vast powers — powers that Congress never gave it — not just over broadband but also over the very ‘edge’ providers it claims to be protecting. The court should be very skeptical of the FCC’s claims to pervasive powers over the Internet.

In the 2015 Order, the FCC Invoked Title II, admitted that it was unworkable for the Internet, and then tried to ‘tailor’ the statute to avoid its worst excesses.

That the FCC felt the need for such sweeping forbearance should have indicated to it that it had ‘taken an interpretive wrong turn’ in understanding the statute Congress gave it. Last year, the Supreme Court blocked a similar attempt by the EPA to ‘modernize’ old legislation in a way that gave it expansive new powers. In its landmark UARG decision, the Court made clear that it won’t allow regulatory agencies to rewrite legislation in an effort to retrofit their statutes to their preferred regulatory regimes.

Internet regulation is a question of ‘vast economic and political significance,’ yet the FCC  didn’t even bother to weigh the costs and benefits of its rule. 

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler never misses an opportunity to talk about the the Internet as ‘the most important network known to Man.’ So why did he and the previous FCC Chairman ignore requests from other commissioners for serious, independent economic analysis of the supposed problem and the best way to address it? Why did the FCC rush to adopt a plan that had the effect of blocking the Federal Trade Commission from applying its consumer protection laws to the Internet? For all the FCC’s talk about protecting consumers, it appears that its real agenda may be simply expanding its own power.

Joining ICLE on the brief are:

  • Richard Epstein (NYU Law)
  • James Huffman (Lewis & Clark Law)
  • Gus Hurwitz (Nebraska Law)
  • Thom Lambert (Missouri Law)
  • Daniel Lyons (Boston College Law)
  • Geoffrey Manne (ICLE)
  • Randy May (Free State Foundation)
  • Jeremy Rabkin (GMU Law)
  • Ronald Rotunda (Chapman Law)
  • Ilya Somin (GMU Law)

Read the brief here, and the summary here.

Read more of ICLE’s work on net neutrality and Title II, including:

  • Highlights from policy and legal comments filed by ICLE and TechFreedom on net neutrality
  • “Regulating the Most Powerful Network Ever,” a scholarly essay by Gus Hurwitz for the Free State Foundation
  • “How to Break the Internet,” an essay by Geoffrey Manne and Ben Sperry, in Reason Magazine
  • “The FCC’s Net Neutrality Victory is Anything But,” an op-ed by Geoffrey Manne, in Wired
  • “The Feds Lost on Net Neutrality, But Won Control of the Internet,” an op-ed by Geoffrey Manne and Berin Szoka in Wired
  • “Net Neutrality’s Hollow Promise to Startups,” an op-ed by Geoffrey Manne and Berin Szoka in Computerworld
  • Letter signed by 32 scholars urging the FTC to caution the FCC against adopting per se net neutrality rules by reclassifying ISPs under Title II
  • The FCC’s Open Internet Roundtables, Policy Approaches, Panel 3, Enhancing Transparency, with Geoffrey Manne?