Can We Agree on Ground Rules for Debate?
Steve Goodman has been practicing telecommunications law since 1983, when he began working at the Federal Communications Commission. He now represents a wide variety of clients, including telecommunications equipment manufacturers, satellite service providers and international carriers.
At its meeting on December 14, 2017, the FCC adopted its latest net neutrality decision on a party-line vote, labeling its action “Restoring Internet Freedom.” This time around, the Commission almost completely undid the previous Commission’s 2015 Open Internet Order.
The FCC decision re-reclassified internet access service as an “information service” (thus rejecting Title II regulatory authority), eliminated all of the Open Internet Order rules except for disclosure obligations, abdicated primary responsibility for enforcing net neutrality to the Federal Trade Commission, and preempted any state net neutrality regulation.
This latest action is unlikely to be the end of the matter. The FCC’s Restoring Internet Freedom decision will be appealed, and the 2015 Open Internet Order is the subject of a pending cert petition at the Supreme Court. And there is talk of enacting legislation so that net neutrality regulation does not shift dramatically with every change in administration.
And so, the net neutrality debate will carry on. But perhaps debate is too refined a characterization of the vicious arguments that the two sides have engaged in for the last several years. We are much more likely to reach a successful resolution if we can observe three ground rules in the debate: clarity, honesty and civility.