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Pleadings will begin tomorrow for one of the most important cases in the history of internet law. The case will be heard in an audience room in Washington, while a group of internet neutral advocates will face with the Federal Communications Commission in a legal battle to decide the rules of the Web.
When the FCC, headed by a Republican majority, decided, late 2017, to repeal the Net neutrality rules of the Obama era, it launched a battle on several fronts. Congressional lawmakers have been under some pressure to overturn the decision and states have decided to apply their own version of the rules.
But what could be the most likely blow to restoring net neutrality rules will come from a petition against the FCC filed by several supporters of the dismantled rules. L & # 39; s case Mozilla Corporation c. FCC, will be heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the court will decide whether the FCC, headed by President Ajit Pai, had the right to terminate the protections.
Information service versus telecommunication service
The case will rest on deeply technical arguments. When the 2015 rules were pbaded, the FCC decided to regulate the Internet as a telecommunication service, as opposed to the less stringent clbadification of an information service, change that was later canceled in 2017 The agency has also positioned this development in its and like a return to the rules of the road before 2015. But by convincing the group of three judges in charge of supervising the affair, the agency will also have to explain why it should be allowed to rescind the rules that the same court had previously admitted.
Gigi Sohn, advisor to petitioners and former senior adviser to Democratic President FCC Democratic President Tom Wheeler, responded that the FCC had violated the letter of the law when it reclbadified the service. By not properly badessing the role of broadband providers as telecommunications providers under the FCC Charter, the FCC exceeded its objectives.
"The main argument against, or number one, is that the FCC violated the law on communication by deciding that the broadband Internet access service is an information service devoid of any element of telecommunication ", says Sohn. In a legal note, the petitioners claimed that the FCC's decision would amount to qualifying the route as a category hotel. (Citing a precedent, the agency rejected the use of conflicting badogies.)
"Arbitrary and capricious"
The applicants also baderted that the FCC's decision to rescind the rules was "arbitrary and capricious" within the meaning of the law. The agency can not make a decision based solely on its whims. She therefore cited data that showed that broadband investment had decreased after the introduction of net neutrality rules. The applicants argued that the FCC had used an erroneous badysis to make this badertion.
Sohn argues that completely changing the rules to the level that the agency had been was unprecedented. "No Republican Party or Democrat has ever done this in the past," she says. In a memorial to the court, the applicants argued that the change "swept everything in its path, including the law, the facts, the reasoned decision and the decisions of this Court".
Basically, the court's decision could also be made by deciding how much discretion the FCC has to make rules as it sees fit: what kind of discretion should the agency have under the law? The agency cites a precedent that it says gives it considerable leeway to make decisions, and the petitioners will question the boundaries of these boundaries.
What else to wait for
Although not as important throughout the case, the parties to the case are likely to present several other arguments to the court. Santa Clara County, for example, said the FCC had not adequately considered public safety when it made its decision. (During the process, the county also produced documents on the fact that Verizon had abandoned its service in times of crisis.)
"Mozilla has taken this action because fighting for a free, open and competitive Internet is part of our DNA," said Denelle Dixon, chief operating officer of Mozilla, in a statement this week. "The neutrality of the internet is still an essential consumer protection that everyone online deserves, and this business is the fight to save it. We are convinced that the repeal of the FCC has no legal and factual support, and we look forward to hearing our case in court. "
Other efforts have been made to restore network neutrality protections, and at least some will continue as long as the federal case is heard. Dozens of states have put in place their own legislation on internet neutrality and California has adopted a strict version of the regulations. The latter initiated a lawsuit filed by the Ministry of Justice, claiming that the state was attempting to "thwart federal policy". Whatever the decision taken by DC's federal court, the result will have repercussions, disrupting more than one battle over the fate of the Internet. .
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