Court’s rejection of FCC’s net neutrality rules sends the issue back to Congress

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission may have to go to Congress to ask for the necessary authority if it means to preserve the Open Internet/network neutrality rules. The question is: should it?

The main problem, which the court seemed to intuit, is that however laudable the FCC’s goals in issuing its net neutrality rules, many of the issues regarding network management practices that really ought to concern policymakers are not so easily framed as questions of telecommunications policy or law. Crucial questions concerning the management of last-mile peering points, discriminatory treatment of services based on their content, bandwidth throttling and over-the-top access to premium content, may be better viewed through the lens of competition policy and antitrust law. If net neutrality proponents were to go to Congress to try to preserve the FCC’s rules, in fact, a good place to start would be with the bill introduced in November by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). Rockefeller’s bill wouldn’t do much to help the FCC with its authority, but it could go a long toward reframing the net neutrality debate in antitrust terms.

[Sweeting is the Principle at Concurrent Media Strategies]