Network Neutrality

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.

[Commentary] Communities across the United States are considering strategies to protect residents’ access to information and their right to privacy.

[Commentary] The Restoring Internet Freedom order was a triumph of ideology over sense, sacrificing the interests of internet users and innovators on the altar of deregulatory purity. Some leading broadband providers, recognizing that they got more from the FCC than they’d bargained for, pledged never to use their newfound freedom to interfere online. But that’s not enough. Ideally, Congress would do something it should have done a decade ago: update federal communications law to give the FCC a mandate and clear authority to protect net neutrality.

[Commentary] There were a lot of rational reasons that Republicans kept a laserlike focus on Obamacare from 2010 to 2016. And  there was a lesson Democrats could take from that. Find an intractable issue that excites the base, and push forward on it, no matter what. They may have found that issue — net neutrality. There’s a legislative tool called the Congressional Review Act, that gives Congress the right to overturn regulations put into effect by the executive branch within 60 working days of the rule being finalized.

[Commentary] While the repeal of network neutrality threatens democracy, by putting free expression at the discretion of a few large companies that can slow down or block what you see or read, the Federal Communications Commission order added a little-noticed but much more direct attack on our ability to make democratic choices about internet access: The agency invoked its power to preempt state laws to block states from setting their own rules about net neutrality. Legislators and governors in several large states are exploring whether there are ways to get around that preemption, and expe

Mozilla filed a petition in federal court in Washington, DC, against the Federal Communications Commission for its recent decision to overturn the 2015 Open Internet Order. It relies on the core principle of net neutrality (that all internet traffic be treated equally) to exist. If that principle is removed — with only some content and services available or with roadblocks inserted by ISPs to throttle or control certain services — the value and impact of that resource can be impaired or destroyed. Ending net neutrality could end the internet as we know it.

New America's Open Technology Institute became one of the first parties to challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s harmful order repealing the net neutrality rules by filing a protective petition for review in the DC Circuit. OTI filed the protective petition in an abundance of caution to ensure that, if a lottery is held determining the proper venue for the case at this stage, the DC Circuit is included in the selection process. 

The following statement can be attributed to Sarah Morris, Director of Open Internet Policy at the Open Technology Institute: