The Trump FCC's Net Neutrality Repeal Is Still Wrong

Public interest commenters, including public safety officials, overwhelmingly agreed with Free Press’s assessment that the Federal Communications Commission’s misguided repeal of Net Neutrality and its authority over broadband internet access service (“BIAS”) harms the Lifeline program, pole attachment regulation, and public safety. These commenters also overwhelmingly agreed that the best remedy for such harms would be for the Commission to once again correctly classify broadband as a Title II service protected by strong open internet rules. While a few commenters proposed alternative legal theories, none of these suggestions are likely to withstand judicial scrutiny or serve the FCC’s statutory mandates. Many industry commenters proposed that the FCC rely on alternative authority over some broadband services through commingled voice and broadband facilities, but this is as short-sighted as it is disingenuous.

Commenters opposed to restoring Title II authority largely fall into two camps: (1) Broadband industry lobbyists who ignore the court’s decision in Mozilla v. FCC by insisting that the FCC has already sufficiently addressed the remand and reiterating the same arguments that already failed the FCC in court, and (2) ideological pro-deregulation groups that by and large fail to address the specific remand areas, and instead proclaim their perpetual and hardly germane distaste for Net Neutrality and Title II. Both camps rely heavily on baseless claims that the Restoring Internet Freedom Order has somehow spurred broadband investment, which they argue must outweigh any other considerations. But these investment claims are spurious and devoid of evidentiary support