President Biden's FCC pick will be instrumental in net neutrality fight

Gigi Sohn [Senior Fellow and Public Advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society], President Joe Biden's pick to fill the vacant seat on the five-member Federal Communications Commission, will pave the way for the restoration of Obama-era net neutrality protections if confirmed by the US Senate. With FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel and Sohn both confirmed, Democrats would have their majority and be poised to fulfill Biden's promise to get net neutrality regulations back on the books. The question that remains is how far the FCC will go in terms of re-establishing net neutrality rules. The agency may simply reinstate the 2015 rules Sohn helped draft. Those rules would require internet service providers, like Comcast and Verizon, to treat all internet traffic equally and bar them from offering "fast lanes" where some companies could pay for their customers to access sites and services faster than via their competitors. The rules also reclassified broadband as a so-called Title II service under the Communications Act, which gave the FCC the power to regulate broadband. "I'm not advocating for just reinstating the old rules," Sohn said then. "We need to push for FCC authority to adopt policy to handle issues like zero-rating and data caps."