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Court Rejects FCC Request To Delay Net Neutrality Case (thehill.com)
A federal appeals court denied the FCC's request to postpone oral arguments in a court battle over the agency's decision to repeal its net neutrality rules. The FCC had asked for the hearing to be postponed since the commission's workforce has largely been furloughed due to the partial government shutdown. The hearing remains set for February 1. The Hill reports: After the FCC repealed the rules requiring internet service providers to treat all web traffic equally in December of 2017, a coalition of consumer groups and state attorneys general sued to reverse the move, arguing that the agency failed to justify it. The FCC asked the three-judge panel from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to delay oral arguments out of "an abundance of caution" due to its lapse of funding. Net neutrality groups opposed the motion, arguing that there is an urgent need to settle the legal questions surrounding the FCC's order.
There are quite a number of lawsuits pending on the subject, I'm not sure which one this story applies to.
But most of them seem to hinge on arguing that (1) the FCC has a duty to protect consumers (the FTC having already announced that it can't do it, contrary to the FCC's assertion), and (2) it failed to follow proper procedures when it repealed the former regulation. At least one claimant also argues that (3) the FCC's justifications for abandoning NN vary from meaningless gibberish to outright lies, although it's not quite clear to me why that should be considered as a legal point rather than a political one.
Whether these complaints have legs, I guess we'll find out - eventually.
Here's the court documents
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/business/state-government-net-neutrality-brief/3178/
Lets look at facts first.
1: You have the FCC Chariman, a previous Verizon lobbyist, dancing in a christmas costume last year taunting the public on a youtube video which I believe was paid for with taxpayer money.
2: You have a public comment period inwhich the FCC's website was flooded with bogus comments which the FCC has refused to release under FOIA so the public can inspect the data themselves to investigate the guilty.
3: Internet based businesses making strong arguments about how broadband companies are being bought up by content producers who intend on forcing a closed market and restricting public access to information. Understand the entire reason Google dediced to force encyrption on the internet is to get rid of ISP's as competitors for consumer data but they also did a heck of a lot of good for privacy as well. There's a lot to this debate.
The correct action is to impeach Ajit just on the Taunt video alone because that is utterly disrespectful of the public, elect a new representative, revert the unpopular rules and put through a new comment period and restart the process. Also, you need to get law enforcement in to investigate bribery, foreign government interference, and the performance of "grants" to ISP's and get appropriate charges filed.
You do that, I think you're going to find a whole lot of bonafide unlawful behaivour.
And I'll remind you, the Northeast just had a 911 outage because of a NIC Configuration issue. That has a body count. Know what else has a body count? Allowing foreign governments to use our media monopoly to engage in psychological warfare against the public. We've done it before, there are Vietnam Era operations manuals on how to do it up and online. This is not just for fun stuff here. There are consequences, in some cases dire consequences, to this discussion.
I've poked around and I can't find a good summary of the lawsuit. The claimants are saying it was unlawful for the FCC to repeal the network neutrality rules? Under what basis? There weren't rules, then there were, then there weren't. Did congress pass something instructing them to regulate network neutrality? Otherwise it seems pretty clear it's entirely up to the FCC.
The Administrative Procedure Act defines the rules and processes for an executive agency to enact, modify, or repeal regulations. If an agency does not follow the APA, the changes can be struck down by a court. That's why, for example, the EPA's removal of certain regulations was reversed by the courts; the EPA failed to show any fact-based reasoning for the changes. Whether or not the courts will rule same way regarding these changes by the FCC remains to be seen.
The second problem is... Congress cannot constitutionally grant any agency power to write regulations... they may only regulate with the laws congress wrote.
Agencies at best can only ask/recommend for Congress to make regulations for them to enforce.
Reality disagrees with you. Congress has, through laws legitimately passed by Congress, delegated the authority to make certain rules to executive agencies. You can go ahead and file lawsuits to get courts to agree to dissolve every executive agency, but I wouldn't bet any money on your success.