Dems Look to Restore Net-Neutrality Regulations on Internet Providers
A bill introduced Thursday by a group of Democratic legislators would once again smash the “Undo” button on net-neutrality regulation.
The Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act would restore rules put forth by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015, which were then flipped under Trump in 2017 to leave ISPs essentially free to speed up, slow down, or outright block certain sites, apps, or services.
The bill, announced(Opens in a new window) by Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Ron. Wyden of Oregon, with Rep. Doris Matsui of California, is far shorter than most tech-policy bills because it makes only one change to a longstanding law. Its three-page text(Opens in a new window) (PDF) amends the Communications Act of 1934(Opens in a new window) (PDF) to put “broadband internet access service” under Title II of that law.
That section bans “common carrier” telecommunications services from “any unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities, or services,” and allows the FCC to enforce those rules–and also regulate the rates and fees charged by these services.
That foundational statute does not, however, explicitly define internet providers as common carriers, which has allowed the FCC to make up its own mind multiple times over the last quarter century. In the 1990s and through the early 2000s(Opens in a new window), the commission treated phone-based digital subscriber line broadband as a common-carrier service–allowing “line-sharing” ISPs(Opens in a new window) to offer DSL over the rented copper phone wires of incumbent telcos.
But in 2002, the FCC decided that cable broadband was not a “telecommunications service” but an “information service” not subject to
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