Court case

Network neutrality supporters are predicting that the Federal Communications Commission will have a hard time defending its decision to repeal its landmark rules in court.  “The draft order seems to say that the FCC is no longer interested in exercising its responsibilities as an expert agency,” said Jonathan Sallet, a former FCC general counsel under the Obama administration. “I do not believe a court of appeals will uphold this order,” he added.

I had the opportunity to go to the Supreme Court to watch the oral arguments in a case called United States v. Carpenter. Carpenter deals with what standard law enforcement must meet to obtain cell site location information from a wireless carrier, which fundamentally is about the appropriate balance between privacy and security. This is an issue of great interest to Verizon.  Verizon joined an amicus brief in the case this summer, and we will host an event in Washington, DC to discuss it in more detail in the new year. 

On December 14th, the Federal Communications Commission will vote to replace current rules enforcing network neutrality. Nothing short of an extinction-level event will prevent it. But before abandoning all hope, know that while the battle for net neutrality at the FCC may have been lost, the war isn’t even close to a conclusion. In reality, the net neutrality fight is merely migrating to a different theater, namely, the US Courts of Appeals. And excluding the possibility of a Supreme Court challenge, the outcome may very well drag on for another year and a half or more.

The impending repeal of net neutrality rules is being used by Charter Communications to fight a lawsuit that alleges the company made false promises of fast Internet service. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in February filed the lawsuit against Charter and its Time Warner Cable subsidiary.

What, if anything, is constraining the Trump Justice Department in its dangerous war on leakers, whistleblowers, and journalists? The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Freedom of the Press Foundation are teaming up to find out.

Defenders of the Federal Communications Commission's current Open Internet rules are plotting out a legal challenge to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to repeal them. This would be the latest in a series of court battles over FCC net neutrality authority. Several groups including Public Knowledge, Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and the Computer & Communications Industry Association expressed interest in a legal challenge, which may consume much of 2018.

AT&T and Time Warner said an explosion of online programming has spawned a “golden age for television—and for consumers,” in its first court filing countering government claims that their planned merger would stymie competition and hurt customers. AT&T, in a formal written answer to the lawsuit, said the video marketplace is changing quickly and is “intensely competitive,” and that nothing about the Time Warner deal would harm that. AT&T said online rivals like Netflix and Amazon were spending billions of dollars on developing and streaming video content, and that leading tech c

[Commentary] No one should be surprised by the Justice Department’s attempt to block AT&T’s $85 billion bid to acquire Time Warner.

[Commentary] It is nice that network neutrality proponents are finally embracing the arguments that those of us who have been critical of the FCC’s Open Internet efforts have been making for nearly the past decade. This newfound concurrence, however, does raise interesting questions about how the inevitable legal challenge to the Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIFO) will proceed.