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FCC Chairman: Net Rules Will Withstand Court Challenge

An anonymous reader writes with this story about FCC chairman Tom Wheeler's confidence that the net neutrality rules the agency passed last month will stand up to upcoming challenges in court."Now that the FCC is the subject of several lawsuits, and its leader, Chairman Tom Wheeler, was dragged in front of Congress repeatedly to answer the same battery of inanity, it's worth checking in to see how the agency is feeling. Is it confident that its recent vote to reclassify broadband under Title II of the Telecommunications Act will hold? Yes, unsurprisingly. Recently, Wheeler gave a speech at Ohio State University, laying out his larger philosophy regarding the open Internet. His second to last paragraph is worth reading: "One final prediction: the FCC's new rules will be upheld by the courts. The DC Circuit sent the previous Open Internet Order back to us and basically said, 'You're trying to impose common carrier-like regulation without stepping up and saying, "these are common carriers.'" We have addressed that issue, which is the underlying issue in all of the debates we've had so far. That gives me great confidence going forward that we will prevail.""

6 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Only Republicans are too stupid... by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This isn't government control of the internet, and government control of the internet would be a very bad thing. How long do you think unbreakable encryption would last if the government had control? The FBI is already starting to take up a position that they want to ban it entirely.

    http://www.theguardian.com/com...

  2. Re:Optimist by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "statist" is an insult used by the kind of people who who call obama a muslim socialist

    it's an inaccurate, hysterical, and unintelligent smear

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    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  3. Re:Only Republicans are too stupid... by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Insightful

    it's kind of like the concept of the free market

    without rules, enforced, all markets quickly devolve into oligarchies and monopolies: customers and smaller players squashed and abused

    so a free market requires government regulation

    likewise, without rules enforcing net neutrality, large market players start fucking with the status quo to siphon off more cash. simply because they can

    but there exists certain idiots in the world, a lot in the usa, who only see the government as a threat. the government IS a threat, in many avenues of life

    but in the market place, the government is usually your only friend when it comes to real abuse from large market players

    there does exist regulatory capture

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

    but again, this is an argument against corruption, not against government. again, the problem with regulatory capture is large market players corrupting the rules. so you want to heal your sick government, not weaken it further, thereby giving large market players yet even more ways to abuse you. and they will

    but certain people, they just utterly lack the awareness that the government is not the only evil bogeyman in the world. many times in fact, like regulatory capture, the government isn't really the ultimate bogeyman, but just the front for the real villains: plutocracy

    we need strong anticorruption rules in the usa. badly. the people are losing to big money. this will be our downfall

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  4. Re:Optimist by silentcoder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As far as they're concerned Obama is a brown-skinned foreign socialist who gives away free healthcare.

    I think they got him confused with Jesus...

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    Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  5. Re:It may survive a court challenge... by nanoflower · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't see it as a sudden change since they had been fighting this war for a number of years. Sure, the FCC had come down on the side of the cable companies most of the time but the fact that the issue of network neutrality came and kept coming up year after year shows that this isn't some sort of massive change out of nowhere. It was a clear reaction to the cable companies refusal to work with the FCC as they clearly kept saying 'I'm not going to do what you want and you can't make me.' This is just the FCC stepping and saying that they can make them do what they want.

    Given what the courts have said in the past I don't see a challenge to the FCC rules coming from the courts. Congress is another matter.

  6. Re:Actually, no they won't. by thaylin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Courts have already agreed they have the authority, so I am not sure where you get your information from.

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    When you cant win, ad hominem.