FCC Net Neutrality Vote Scheduled for April Meeting

If adopted, the net neutrality proposal would mean a return to the commission's 2015 rules and reclassifying broadband as a Communications Act Title II telecom service. The proposed rules would provide greater consumer protections to prevent companies from selling customers' sensitive information. It would also give the FCC greater oversight on broadband outages, said an agency official. Without stronger reporting requirements, the commission "can't really fully understand when and how service providers are responding to internet service and network outages," the official added.

The draft order lacks an exemption for 5G network slicing, which CTIA and the major wireless carriers requested. “There’s no new rule that applies to network slicing,” but the 2015 rules including prohibition on “blocking, throttling, paid prioritization and our analysis of what falls within [broadband internet access service] … and non-BIAS data services" apply to network slicing, an FCC official said. Slicing would be “considered like any other new technology” under the proposed framework, the official added.

The order also appears to address Communications Act Section 214 requirements for broadband providers. Section 214 authority lets the agency “monitor and mitigate the existence of bad actors in telecommunications systems,” but that doesn’t “extend to broadband,” the official said. The FCC's work denying foreign entities' access would be “extremely limited,” the official said.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr was quick to slam the proposed rules. “Americans’ own experiences have demonstrated that Title II is a solution that doesn’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist,” Carr said: “Gone are the old justifications -- replaced with new ones. None of them withstand even casual scrutiny.” Carr described the plan as "freewheeling micromanagement by government bureaucrats."

Commissioner Anna Gomez said she would hold two roundtables with the public at FCC headquarters on April 10 and 11. “Today’s world depends so much on being connected,” Gomez said. “The purpose of the proceeding is to determine how best to safeguard and secure broadband infrastructure, protect consumers, and ensure that the Internet remains open and available to all content providers and consumers,” she said.

Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and three other senior Democrats urged the FCC ahead of the announcement to “move swiftly to finalize” the net neutrality rulemaking. Markey in 2022 led filing the Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act to mandate Title II reclassification (see 2207280063). “As part of this rulemaking, the FCC should ensure that ISPs cannot exploit loopholes to circumvent these protections,” Markey and the other Democratic senators said Tuesday night in a letter to Rosenworcel. They in part called for the FCC to “ensure it has jurisdiction” via the order over wholesale broadband providers “and has the authority to adjudicate disputes between wholesale providers and resellers pursuant to Title II.” The senators also urged the FCC to “ensure that ISPs cannot evade the net neutrality protections by improperly labeling certain” broadband apps and services as a non-broadband “data service outside the bounds of Title II” and ensure providers can’t “evade” the throttling ban “by speeding up” certain apps. The other Democrats were Sens. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.).

Restoring Title II regulations "will assure that a handful of powerful telecommunications companies will not favor themselves and their business partners over consumers," said Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Senior Counselor Andrew Schwartzman. While Incompas would "prefer Congress to act on this important issue ... we applaud Chairwoman Rosenworcel's announcement today," CEO Chip Pickering said.

The FCC "should not deter our members from their work of investing billions to increase broadband access and adoption," said ACA Connects President-CEO Grant Spellmeyer. The commission should "abandon this unwarranted proposal," he added. Said NCTA President Michael Powell, “In the absence of any harm, the FCC is barreling ahead with a backward-looking, unnecessary proposal.” The "new net neutrality is like the old net neutrality, only worse," Citizens Against Government Waste President Tom Schatz said: "It will make it harder to close the digital divide." Taxpayers Protection Alliance President David Williams said the announcement is "deeply disappointing."

“For nearly two decades, the large ISPs and mobile carriers have tried to make a virtue of escaping any accountability -- all the while pretending that any sort of open internet protections for consumers were intolerable burdens instead of common sense rules of the road,” said Raza Panjwani, senior policy counsel at New America's Open Technology Institute. “It's time to put this issue to bed once and for all,” he said.

“Under these strong but flexible FCC rules, every ISP will be responsible for making resilient networks available to people on just and reasonable terms,” Free Press Action co-CEO Craig Aaron said. “They won’t be able to pick and choose what any of us can say or see online.”

"It will be important to understand the extent to which the FCC recognizes the rights of states to address critical consumer protections related to broadband, as delegated to the states by Congress," said Regina Costa, Telecom Committee chair for the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates. NASUCA supports the FCC recognizing that broadband is an essential telecom service subject to Title II, she said.

"NARUC has long supported the FCC setting ground rules for non-discriminatory access to what had, until the somewhat controversial BrandX decision, always been considered a telecommunications service," said a spokesperson for the association of state utility regulators.