Title II

The Donald Trump Administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced they on December 14 would be rightly, reasonably undoing the Barack Obama Administration FCC’s ridiculous, regressive Internet power grab.

The Federal Communications Commission just released its plan to restore internet freedom, which will bring back the historical light-touch framework that instilled regulatory certainty and propelled over a trillion dollars in investments in better broadband services.

In 2015, the FCC’s Title II Open Internet broadband order was predicated on a demonstrably false central competitive premise: that the Internet’s edge was competitive while the broadband Internet core was not competitive. The facts prove the opposite.

John Oliver won’t have the same effect he had in 2014.

Net neutrality proponents who summarily dismiss any potential for Congress to resolve net neutrality with a legislative compromise, might want to rethink that heroic assumption after closely reading the Pai-FCC’s Title II NPRM.

Why is net neutrality, the controversial notion that all Internet traffic should be treated the same, so difficult to resolve? An underappreciated reason is each side defines the core terms of net neutrality very differently.

Defenders of the previous FCC’s Title II Open Internet Order appear afraid to have a free and open discussion about how Title II net neutrality affects American consumers.

Unlike the Federal Communications Commission’s previous head, new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is putting consumers first, not net neutrality.

The growth starts now.

When one’s actions demonstrably create a worse rather than better outcome net-net, like the FCC’s new Title II ISP privacy policy does, others would justifiably consider it a mistake.

Net neutrality absolutists are overreaching yet again in their push for a practical FCC ban of ISP zero rating offers under the FCC’s case-by-case “General Conduct Standard” review, by claiming violations of the “bright-line rules” in the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization.

In arbitrarily applying Title II telecommunications rules to only the ISP half of Internet communications, while politically exempting the entire edge half of Internet communications in its Open Internet order, the FCC has ensured that information that was proprietary and controllable in the closed telephone world becomes public and uncontrollable in the open Internet world.

The central overriding question in the USTelecom v. FCC case challenging the FCC’s Open Internet Order may be: did the FCC read Judge Tatel right in that he de facto guided the FCC to pursue Title II to create the most solid legal foundation for net neutrality? That has been the public legal mantra of the FCC and the net neutrality movement for well over a year.