Appeals court upholds FCC's cancelling of net neutrality rules

A federal appeals court on Tuesday affirmed that the Federal Communications Commission acted lawfully when it scrapped the U.S. government’s net neutrality rules in 2017, but it opened the door for state and local governments to introduce their own regulations designed to treat all web traffic equally.

In a nearly 200-page opinion, judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals largely sided with the FCC and its Republican chairman, Ajit Pai, who was appointed to his position by President Trump. While the agency must return to the drawing board on some elements of its repeal, the court upheld the legal underpinnings of the FCC’s work, finding that net neutrality supporters had made “unconvincing” arguments in their efforts to override the FCC’s deregulation of companies such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.

But the ruling still appeared to offer a lifeline to net neutrality supporters: It overruled an effort by the FCC to block states from adopting open-internet protections of their own. The FCC preempted those regulations as part of its prior repeal, but the court determined the telecom agency had overstepped its authority. In unwinding the agency’s blockade on such protections, the judges opened the door for states such as California to forge ahead with their plans for regulation.

In a statement, Pai heralded the court’s mixed decision as a victory. “The court affirmed the FCC’s decision to repeal 1930s utility-style regulation of the Internet imposed by the prior administration,” he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/01/appeals-court-upholds-trump-administrations-cancelling-net-neutrality-rules/