Regulatory classification

Following the controversial Federal Communications Commission’s decision to repeal network neutrality, a coalition of 22 attorneys general, including Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, filed a petition for review of the decision in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Jan 16. However, professor of information systems management at Carnegie Mellon University Rahul Telang said he believes that the FCC will be successful.

California state lawmakers are angling for another fight with the Trump administration, this time to revive federal net neutrality rules that they say are crucial to a fair, open and free internet. 

On Dec 4, 2017, several members of Congress wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai expressing deep concern about the "proposal to roll back critical consumer protections by dismantling...current net neutrality rules." Due to reports that bots may have interfered with the proceeding and reports that "50,000 consumer complaints seem to have been excluded from the public record", the members of Congress requested that the FCC delay its planned vote on the item until it could conduct a thorough review of the state of the record and "provide Congress with greater assurance

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is pushing for a floor vote on a bill that would stop the Federal Communications Commission from repealing network neutrality.  “December’s radical FCC vote to dismantle net neutrality has endangered the American entrepreneurship and freedom that are the envy of the world,” Rep Pelosi said. “Congress must act to reverse this destructive FCC ruling that steamrolled over a bipartisan, decades-long consensus and the will of the American people to undermine the fair playing field that is the heart of the internet.”

Over the past 25 years, the internet has grown and changed in ways, both good and bad, that no one predicted. But at least one thing is constant: concern about how the Internet is regulated.  The Federal Communications Commission’s decision in Dec to change the regulatory framework governing internet service providers (ISPs) isn’t going to change that concern.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube on Jan 17 told lawmakers that they support a legislative effort to restore net neutrality rules wiped out by the Federal Communications Commission in Dec. Executives appearing before the Senate Commerce Committee replied to Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) who asked their position on his resolution to nullify the FCC’s action. YouTube’s Juniper Downs, global head of public policy and government relations, said the platform “will support any effort” to put back in place the rules gutted by the FCC.

On Jan 15, Democrats announced all 49 of their senators, and one Republican will vote on a bill that uses the Congressional Review Act to reinstate the regulation. What are the chances that Democrats will succeed? It seems unlikely. While it's true that Democrats only need one more Republican to side with them in the Senate to get to 51 votes, they still need a majority in the House of Representatives, where Republicans have a far greater margin -- 238 Republicans to 193 Democrats.

There is a great deal of excitement, but also a great deal of misunderstanding, about the effort to “repeal the repeal” of network neutrality using the Congressional Review Act (CRA). On the one hand, we have folks who are confused by the enormous progress made so far and think that we are just one vote shy of repealing the repeal. On the other extreme, we have the folks declaring the effort totally doomed and impossible from the start. I discuss the details of a CRA, and why I think we can win this (and even if we don’t, why it still works in our favor overall), below. 

As citizens increasingly use digital tools to engage with government, federal agencies should weed out fake comments to create a more robust public comment system. If agencies are required to solicit public input, it should take on a form that the agency can easy incorporate into new rules. The Administrative Procedures Act could not have anticipated the digital communications tools available to citizens seven decades later. An updated method of collecting feedback would require commenters to verify their identity, or at least verify they are human.

[Commentary] With each congressional office getting thousands of calls for Network Neutrality and close to zero supporting Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai — and with Net Neutrality looking like a real issue in the 2018 elections — we’ve got a shot at passing the resolution. If you haven’t yet called your members of Congress, please do it now. And, yes, the president would need to sign this bill. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, so I’ll just say we welcome that fight.