Net Neutrality to Face Lawsuits, Congressional Investigations

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http://freebeacon.com/issues/net-neutrality-to-face-lawsuits-congressional-investigations/

Net Neutrality to Face Lawsuits, Congressional Investigations
Fight over Internet regulation not over

BY: Josh Peterson
February 27, 2015 5:01 am

The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday in favor of a proposal that will expand its influence over the Internet, but lawsuits from major Internet service providers (ISPs) as well as several congressional investigations mean the fight over Internet regulation is far from over.

In a 3-2 vote on Thursday, the FCC passed a proposal, the details of which have not been disclosed, to regulate Internet providers under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, which was developed for telephone networks during the Great Depression.

“The regulation and litigation uncertainty caused by the FCC’s action will inhibit investment in new networks but also end up harming many of the companies pushing for Title II,” said Robert McDowell senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think thank, in a phone interview on Wednesday.

“Title II is a very powerful law, and it can’t be so easily shaped and narrowed as the proponents are advertising,” said McDowell, a former FCC commissioner.

Major ISPs, such as AT&T and Verizon, are expected to sue the agency over the rules.

Francis Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer, told a New York audience in December 2014 that if the FCC chose to regulate broadband providers under Title II that she thought it would be a “litigious environment.”

Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs, said in November 2014 that should the FCC enact Title II, the ISP “would expect to participate in a legal challenge to such action.”

The public has to wait until the order is published in the Federal Register before it can see the rules. Publication is expected to take days or even weeks.

The FCC has promised to restrain itself from using the full authority granted to it by Congress under Title II, and supporters of the chairman’s plan, despite not having seen the rules themselves, have towed the government line.

In addition to lawsuit challenges to the FCC rules, three separate congressional investigations are also underway into attempts by the White House to influence the decision making of Thomas Wheeler, the FCC’s chairman.

“This chairman is not a lapdog for the president. He’s acting independently and he’s acting based on an evolution over a year proceeding,” said Gigi Sohn, Wheeler’s special counsel for external affairs, during a radio interview.

Sohn’s remarks came just several days before the original Feb. 20 due date Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), the head of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, gave Wheeler’s office to deliver documents to his committee for one of the three investigations.

Wheeler’s office missed the both the original deadline and the extended deadline. An FCC official said on Monday that Wheeler’s office asked for more time due to the size of Chaffetz’s request.

Chaffetz’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans in the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs have also launched investigations into the agency.

Wheeler earned a rebuke Wednesday from both Chaffetz and Rep. Fred Upton (R., Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, after declining a request to testify before Congress on his net neutrality proposal.

“After hearing from over four million Americans on such an important topic to our economic and cultural future, it’s striking that when Congress seeks transparency, Chairman Wheeler opts against it,” said Upton and Chaffetz.

Ajit Pai, one of the FCC’s five commissioners, said during a press conference on Feb. 10 that not only did he finish reading all 332 pages of what he characterizes as “President Obama’s Internet regulation plan,” but that it was “worse” than he imagined.

“The American people are being misled about President Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet,” said Pai.

Wheeler and his office launched a public relations offensive during the first week of February to promote the benefits of his proposal, criticizing attempts to label the rules as utility-style regulations.

The chairman published an op-ed at Wired.com and a “fact sheet” on the FCC website as a rebuttal to his critics.

During a media conference call that same week, senior FCC officials unwilling to allow their names to be attributed to any statements made said that the rules would not regulate rates like a public-utility.

Commissioner Pai said that the plan does give the agency that authority, releasing his own “fact sheet” to counter Wheeler’s.

Pai said that he had no plans to leak the chairman’s order to the public out of respect for the FCC’s rules.

Advocates in favor of the new plan have defended Wheeler’s decision to withhold the document from the public. Free Press and New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, both influential pro-net neutrality organizations, rejected Pai’s claims as “misleading.”

The Technology Policy Institute published a study on Feb. 9, which found that the FCC almost always published its orders “immediately following the vote” until the early 1970.

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Congressional investigations................................

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The public has to wait until the order is published in the Federal Register before it can see the rules. Publication is expected to take days or even weeks.

  weeks? 

[Fishrrman]

[[ The public has to wait until the order is published in the Federal Register before it can see the rules. Publication is expected to take days or even weeks. ]]

Why didn't one of the Republicans at the FCC quietly "leak" the regs to the public ??
(That's an entirely serious question)

[rangerrebew]

Republicans strike back: FCC member invokes Star Wars in net neutrality fight




 
Republican Ajit Pai quotes Emperor Palpatine, of Star Wars’s evil galactic empire, in attack on new broadband rules regulating the internet

 
Friday 27 February 2015 14.08 EST  Last modified on Friday 27 February 2015 16.15 EST 


Republicans invoked Star Wars’s evil galactic emperor in their attacks on new broadband regulations on Friday, warning that the public and Silicon Valley were in for an unpleasant surprise.

Quoting Emperor Palpatine, Republican Ajit Pai, a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), said: “Young fool … Only now, at the end, do you

Net neutrality activists score landmark victory in fight to govern the internet

 
Meme wars between the two sides of the debate continued through the day, as internet advocates Fight for the Future, Demand Progress and Free Press flew an airplane towing a 2,000 square foot banner over the towering corporate headquarters of the cable giant Comcast, in Philadelphia.

The victory banner depicted the feline internet star Grumpy Cat and the legend: “Comcast: Don’t Mess With the Internet. #SorryNotSorry.”

Referring to Pai’s comments Evan Greer, campaigns director at Fight for the Future, said: “What they didn’t know is that when they struck down the last rules we would come back more powerful than they could possibly imagine.”

Pai and fellow Republican FCC commissioner Mike O’Rielly, who have been consistent critics of the FCC’s new rules, said once they are published people will realise that they will stifle innovation and lead to taxes and increased rates for the public.

“When you see this document, it’s worse than you imagine,” said O’Rielly at a conference in Washington organised by the think tank TechFreedom.

The FCC on Thursday voted through strict new rules to regulate broadband and protect net neutrality – the principle that all information and services should have equal access to the internet.


The historic vote was cheered by internet activists, President Barack Obama and many in the tech community. However, few people have seen the actual orders. On Friday the FCC was finalising its documentation for publication – it it is not expected to release the orders until next week at the very earliest.

Pai said the new rules would mean “permission-less innovation is a thing of the past”. The new rules will ban broadband providers from creating fast lanes for some or slowing the traffic of others for commercial reasons. They will also give the FCC the power to police conduct by broadband providers on a case-by-case basis.

Internet service providers will not be allowed to “unreasonably interfere with or unreasonably disadvantage” consumers’ access to content and services.

O’Rielly said this would mean that any company looking to start a new service would have to seek permission ahead of time. He said anybody looking for new business opportunities in the document would be best off becoming a “telecoms lawyer”.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/27/republicans-strike-back-fcc-member-star-wars-net-neutrality

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The Republican Party Is Divided On Net Neutrality

Some conservatives want to pursue a legislative compromise. Others are urging more extreme means—and holding the FCC’s funding hostage is not out of the question.

By Dustin Volz

February 26, 2015 As Internet activists celebrated their net-neutrality win Thursday, Republicans were already plotting their revenge.

GOP lawmakers were virtually unanimous in expressing their outrage about the Federal Communications Commission's vote to reclassify the Internet as a utility. But there is widening disagreement within the ranks about just what flavor of revenge the party should ultimately pursue, such as compromise legislation, a congressional resolution of disapproval, or a fight over FCC funding.



"There's going to be a lot of Republicans in both the House and Senate who are going to want to express their opposition to what the FCC is doing," Sen. John Thune, who chairs the upper chamber's Commerce Committee, told National Journal moments before the FCC vote took place. "If we can't come together behind a legislative solution, I suspect that those other options are on the table."

Thune, the Senate's No. 3 Republican, has been at the forefront of his party's efforts to pursue legislation that would essentially enforce the meat of the FCC's net-neutrality protections without designating the Internet as a "telecommunications service." Though Thune has had some success earning the interest of a handful of moderate Democrats, such as Sens. Bill Nelson and Claire McCaskill, most Democrats have shown little interest in the proposal.

"Along with many of my colleagues, I regard this as a nonstarter," Sen Al Franken, a vocal net-neutrality proponent, said late Thursday in reference to Thune's legislation.
 

A lot of Republicans appear to have little interest in pushing legislation, either, preferring instead to blast the FCC action as another example of overreach by the Obama administration. In lieu of a compromise, many have floated more punitive measures.

Twenty-one House Republicans sent a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler vowing to push a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act—which only needs a simple majority in both houses—to nullify the agency's actions and prevent any future reliance on Title II of the Communications Act. The president can still veto such a resolution.

"We will not stand by idly as the White House, using the FCC, attempts to advance rules that imperil the future of the Internet," the Republicans, led by Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, wrote. They added that they intended to "take every action necessary to ensure that the Internet remains a free, competitive marketplace."

The substance and bellicose rhetoric of that salvo, however, did not align with a joint statement from a separate batch of Republicans on the House Commerce Committee's communications and technology panel. Like Thune, the House panel has been working for legislation on net neutrality and pledged to seek compromise with Democrats.



"We believe the Internet has worked well under current rules, but we were—and we remain—willing to come to the table with legislation to answer the calls for legally sustainable consumer protections for the free and open Internet that has fostered a generation of innovation, economic growth, and global empowerment," the Republican letter said.

Thune, for his part, said he was willing to tweak his legislation to get more Democrats on board. He specifically highlighted concerns that Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, had about language in his bill that would limit powers under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act to strike down state laws limiting municipal broadband.

"We don't want to have an unbounded 706. I think that's really dangerous," Thune said. "But we're willing to listen to their suggestions."


But Thune conceded his more combative colleagues may ultimately win out. Though he prefers a legislative solution, he said a resolution of disapproval could "certainly be one way" to respond to the FCC's vote.

And a standoff over the FCC's budget isn't out of the question, either.

"Using the funding process could be another way," Thune said. "I don't think we're going to get into a DHS-type situation like this, but I do think that we could, by various riders on appropriations bills, attempt to send that message. So we'll see—I'm not ruling anything out."

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/the-republican-party-is-divided-on-net-neutrality-20150226

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FCC Commissioner Demolishes Net’s New Rules, In 3 Quick Points

Posted By Peter Fricke On 7:57 PM 02/27/2015 In | No Comments
 

After casting a futile vote against the FCC’s plan to regulate the Internet as a public utility, Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai delivered a blistering attack on the new rules.

In his dissenting statement, Pai advanced three main objections to the Commission’s “Open Internet Order:” (RELATED: The Top 10 Failures of FCC Title II Utility Regulation)
 
 

1. The Internet has grown rapidly, creating untold economic benefits, largely because the government has refrained from interfering with it.

“For twenty years, there’s been a bipartisan consensus in favor of a free and open Internet … [and] the results speak for themselves. Dating back to the Clinton Administration, every FCC Chairman—Republican and Democrat—has let the Internet grow free from utility-style regulation.”

“But today, the FCC abandons those policies. It reclassifies broadband Internet access service as a Title II telecommunications service. It seizes unilateral authority to regulate Internet conduct, to direct where Internet service providers (ISPs) make their investments, and to determine what service plans will be available to the American public.”

 
“This is … a radical departure from the bipartisan, market-oriented policies that have served us so well for the last two decades.” (RELATED: Net Neutrality Bait and Switch to Title II)

2. Title II regulations attempt to solve problems that don’t exist with enough consistency to address with federal government regulation.

Everyone seems to site Verizon’s nasty spat with Netflix here. The story goes that Verizon throttled Netflix’ streaming speeds until Netflix paid a ransom, thus Net Neutrality is necessary to protect hapless consumers and poor, little old Internet companies like Netflix (the folks at The Washington Post actually went so far as to make this connection directly).

No one mentions that Verizon took an absolute shellacking in the court of public opinion and clever consumers found a solution to the throttling that literally takes five minutes to fix — in short, the free market and free Internet largely prevailed on its own (as both are apt to do). Needless to say, far and few between are government regulations that are cheap and take five minutes to enact and don’t cause 10 more unintended problems in their wake (are there any?).

 
Here’s what Pai had to say:

“So the FCC is abandoning a 20-year-old, bipartisan framework for keeping the Internet free and open in favor of Great Depression-era legislation designed to regulate Ma Bell. But at least we’re getting something in return, right? Wrong. The Internet is not broken. There is no problem for the government to solve.”

“Nevertheless, the Order ominously claims that ‘[t]hreats to Internet openness remain today.’ It argues that broadband providers ‘hold all the tools necessary to deceive consumers, degrade content, or disfavor the content that they don’t like,’ and it asserts that the FCC continues ‘to hear concerns about other broadband provider practices involving blocking or degrading third-party applications.’”

“The evidence of these continuing threats? There is none; it’s all anecdote, hypothesis, and hysteria. A small ISP in North Carolina allegedly blocked VoIP calls a decade ago. Comcast capped BitTorrent traffic to ease upload congestion eight years ago. Apple introduced Facetime over Wi-Fi first, cellular networks later. Examples this picayune and stale aren’t enough to tell a coherent story about net neutrality. The bogeyman never had it so easy.”

3. Title II regulations will lead to new taxes and slower broadband speeds for consumers.

“Literally nothing in this Order will promote competition among ISPs. To the contrary, reclassifying broadband will drive competitors out of business. Monopoly rules designed for the monopoly era will inevitably move us in the direction of a monopoly. If you liked the Ma Bell monopoly in the 20th century, you’ll love Pa Broadband in the 21st.”

“One avenue for higher bills is the new taxes and fees that will be applied to broadband. If you look at your phone bill, you’ll see a ‘Universal Service Fee,’ or something like it. These fees—what most Americans would call taxes—are paid by Americans on their telephone service.”

“Consumers haven’t had to pay these taxes on their broadband bills because broadband has never before been a Title II service. But now it is. And so the Order explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes. Indeed, it repeatedly states that it is only deferring a decision on new broadband taxes—not prohibiting them.”

“These Internet regulations will work another serious harm on consumers. Their broadband speeds will be slower.” (RELATED: Title II Will Kill Internet Investment, Critics Claim)

“The record is replete with evidence that Title II regulations will slow investment and innovation in broadband networks. Remember:  Broadband networks don’t have to be built. Capital doesn’t have to be invested here. Risks don’t have to be taken. The more difficult the FCC makes the business case for deployment, the less likely it is that broadband providers big and small will connect Americans with digital opportunities.”

“The Old World offers a cautionary tale here. Compare the broadband market in the United States to that in Europe, where broadband is generally regulated as a public utility. Today, 82 percent of Americans have access to 25 Mbps broadband speeds. In Europe, that figure is only 54 percent. Moreover, in the United States, average mobile broadband speeds are 30% faster than they are in Western Europe.”

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URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/27/net-neutrality-arguments/

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The Republican Party Is Divided On Net Neutrality

Which means FCC/valjar wins.