Network Neutrality

The Open Technology Institute at New America (“OTI”) urged the Federal Communications Commission to restore its authority to hold ISPs accountable for anti-consumer policies and behavior by reclassifying broadband internet access services as a Title II telecommunications service and reestablishing net neutrality protections across the United States. OTI’s comments urge the FCC to update its rules to address additional issues like “zero rating” and paid interconnection agreements, and to improve ISPs’ transparency to consumers about their broadband services.

In these comments we explain why Title II classification is unnecessary and potentially harmful.  Specifically, we make the following points: 

Already the Federal Communications Commission’s busiest docket, the effort to restore network neutrality rules saw a rush of new comments on December 14, the deadline for initial submissions by interested parties looking to affect the outcome of the proceeding. Replies to those comments are due January 17, 2024, after which the FCC can schedule a vote on a final rulemaking. A majority of FCC Commissioners support restoring the rules by reclassifying internet access as a Title II telecommunications service subject to FCC regulation as a common carrier.

For 20 years, proponents of so-called Title II net neutrality have argued the only way to ‘save the internet’ is to impose 1930s-era Ma Bell telephone regulations on today’s broadband networks.

In comments filed at the Federal Communications Commission, Public Knowledge commended the FCC for acting to restore net neutrality as well as creating the proper authority allowing for commonsense consumer protections for broadband users.

In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress directed the Federal Communications Commission to reduce regulation. While the FCC initially made several bipartisan steps in that direction, over the last three presidential administrations the agency has switched between aggressive and relaxed regulation of broadband services on an explicitly partisan basis, including the imposition of legacy common carrier regulation on broadband services in the name of Net Neutrality.

The US broadband industry is protesting a Federal Communications Commission plan to measure the affordability of Internet service. The FCC has been evaluating US-wide broadband deployment progress on a near-annual basis for almost three decades but hasn't factored affordability into these regular reviews.

On October 6, 2023, Rep Tim Walberg (R-MI) wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel to express concerns that she "misled the public and [was] not truthful" in Congressional testimony and has proposed broadband rate regulation. In her November 14 reply to Rep Walberg, Chairwoman Rosenworcel said, "I have no interest in pursuing regulation of broadband rates." She included a paragraph from the net neutrality/Title II proposal which reads:

The big ISPs certainly have their knickers in a knot over the adoption of digital discrimination rules by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC was required to adopt some version of digital discrimination rules by language included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

One of the longest-running debates about internet access has entered a new phase, and the way it unfolds could directly affect everything you do online. You might remember the net neutrality debate from a decade ago.