Verizon is taking aim at network neutrality regulations enacted by the Federal Communications Commission with an outsized legal appeal. The company's 116-page tome filed on Monday evening has a glossary, 53 pages of legal argument, inflammatory prose on regulating the Internet and even a claim that the FCC is trampling the First Amendment rights of ISPs. It's all a bit much but Verizon may prevail.
That's because, underneath all the bluster, Verizon has a strong core argument that the FCC overstepped its bounds in enacting these net neutrality rules. The FCC, you see, can regulate the physical pipes over which packets travel on the network pretty stringently, but less so the actual service or content those packets are meant to deliver. Consider that the FCC can regulate roads but not the mail delivery using those roads.
Did the FCC neuter its ability to regulate the Internet?
At least that's how the same court that will hear the Verizon case ruled back in 2010 when it handed a victory to Comcast after the FCC censured it for blocking peer-to-peer packets. At the time, the court's ruling set off a huge debate over the FCC's regulatory authority over the Internet and arguments over whether the FCC needed to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service rather than an in information service.
FCC chairman Julius Genachowski's net neutrality efforts are getting closer to their day in court.
The grist for these debates was a series of decisions beginning in 2002 in which the FCC basically said cable, DSL and wireless were information services — which the FCC doesn't regulate as stringently — as opposed to a telecommunications service which it does. But because it really wanted to focus on the net neutrality regulations as opposed to this dull reclassification issue, the FCC dropped the idea of reclassifying broadband entirely and went ahead with what it dubbed "the third way" approach where broadband would be considered telecommunications but it wouldn't be subject to onerous rules associated with telecommunications services outline in the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
No comments:
Post a Comment