The FCC's Classification of Mobile Broadband Ignores Technology, History, and Common Sense

The Federal Communications Commission’s 2018 Restoring Internet Freedom (RIF) Order reclassified mobile broadband Internet access service from a commercial mobile service to a private mobile service, largely by ignoring the integration of the Internet with the telephone network.  This reclassification gave the FCC the license to repeal the 2015 net neutrality rules for mobile broadband service. How did this FCC get to the conclusion that the most important public mobile service of our time is a private mobile service? It did so by choosing to ignore the entire history before 1994 of classification of mobile services as public or private, and by adopting an implausible interpretation of Congress’s 1994 definitions.

[Scott Jordan is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He served as the Chief Technologist of the Federal Communications Commission during 2014-2016.]