Why US ruling could be a 'conversation starter' in global net neutrality debate

The network neutrality decision issued by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirms the Federal Communications Commission’s rules just as Europe is finalizing net neutrality regulations of its own.

“I think it’s a significant victory for net neutrality. I don’t know that other countries have been waiting for the US, in some respects the issue has been pushed much further in other countries,” says James Grimmelmann, a law professor at the University of Maryland who studies the internet and legal issues. “What this does is it clear the way for the FCC to deal with the actual hard questions, the hard things that they would like to do in terms of innovative services,” he adds, mentioning changes in smart-home technology and Internet of Things devices. The decision frees the FCC to tackle a variety of related issues. One is concerns about zero rating, a practice where companies exempt data from counting against a users’ cap on data use, such as T-Mobile’s BingeOn, which offers unlimited video streaming.

When it banned Facebook’s Free Basics service, India’s telecom regulator explicitly pointed to net neutrality concerns. But, in the US, says Professor Grimmelmann, “I think it’s tricky, it’s very easy to build the coalition and the case for anti-blocking rules and it’s very easy to take the general ‘treat-all traffic-alike’ as a rule and a slogan. But when you get in the weeds of [questions] about T-Mobile and BingeOn, it’s harder to say if that’s a violation of network neutrality.”

A second concern is online privacy.