FCC move to restore net neutrality sets stage for familiar fight

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration’s move to restore net neutrality will need to pass legal tests to stick, and even then it will be at risk of a rollback under a future administration if Congress doesn’t act.

All of that means the outlook for the broadband industry is riding on the outcome of the November election, in a fight that has been playing out for years.

The Federal Communications Commission last week said it plans to vote later this month on a draft order that would classify “broadband Internet access service as a telecommunications service,” arguing that is the best reading of U.S. law.

In other words, the rule change would treat internet service like landline telephone service, allowing the agency to reinstate net neutrality principles. That would prevent internet service providers from discriminating by speeding up or slowing traffic to certain websites. It would also mean that internet service providers can’t charge more for or indiscriminately block access to sites.

“The most important part of this whole move is the one that reinstates the FCC’s oversight over broadband,” said Gigi Sohn, head of the American Association for Public Broadband.

Without the rule change, “the FCC has no regulatory power over broadband internet access providers, which is kind of insane because it’s the most important network of our time,” Sohn said in an interview.

Sohn, a former FCC official, was nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as an FCC commissioner but withdrew because of congressional opposition. The reclassification of internet service and net neutrality restoration “are needed protections [that] help protect marginalized groups, faith communities, and political voices and ensure that it is the consumer — not the companies — that decide for themselves how they’d like their experience online to be,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group focused on digital rights, said in a statement.

The debate over whether internet service should be considered a telecom service under U.S. law has been playing out for nearly two decades.

The Obama administration in 2015 adopted net neutrality principles that were opposed by Republicans and the industry. The Trump administration rolled back those rules in 2017.