Just a few weeks ago, the limitations of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) regulatory authority was not well defined. However, as Marguerite Reardon explains, that all changed when the D.C. court handed down its net neutrality opinion a few weeks ago. Now: “[T]he FCC and even local public utility commissions can . . . impose regulations on the Internet, overriding any local or state laws that may forbid such regulation.”
Essentially, too, as discussed briefly in the full post on the Court’s opinion, the Court gave the FCC a roadmap for how to enforce net neutrality and, based on a broad reading of the Court’s opinion, Reardon outlines how the FCC now has the authority to regulate broadband rates and pricing for Internet services. “It might even give the FCC authority to insert itself into copyright disputes.”
I encourage you to take a look at Reardon’s article for yourself, but here’s how she and Harold Feld, senior vice president with non-profit agency Public Knowledge, break down why so much power in the FCC’s hands could be problematic:
Not only should this scare broadband providers, but . . . Google, Amazon, Netflix, and any other company operating on the Internet . . . should be concerned. . . . [T]he FCC’s authority could even extent to content providers who use the Internet to distribute content. This is exactly why Judge Laurence Silberman . . . dissented in part to the court’s ruling. . . . [H]e said the decision grants the ‘FCC virtually unlimited power to regulate the Internet.’
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