A US federal appeals court on Thursday struck down net neutrality regulations that had pit telecommunications companies and internet service providers against the Federal Communications Commission.
The ruling comes after the FCC voted last year to restore regulations that would require ISPs, including companies like AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, to treat internet traffic equally.
Net neutrality advocates argued that the regulations protected consumers from being charged premium prices to access certain types of data, such as streaming video, or from having their speeds throttled when accessing content from companies competing with the ISPs.
Critics of the regulations argued that they removed the ability of ISPs to manage internet traffic and make key business decisions about their data infrastructure without government interference.
The FCC first introduced the net neutrality regulations during the administration of Democratic former President Barack Obama. They were dismantled during the first administration of Republican Donald Trump, and then given new life under Democrat Joe Biden’s presidency.
Many industry observers anticipated that they’d be rolled back again with President-elect Trump’s choice this past November of Brendan Carr to step in as FCC chair during Trump’s upcoming second administration. But the decision by the all-Republican panel on the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit has killed net neutrality at the federal level even before Carr takes the helm at the agency.
In response to the decision, outgoing FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement that US citizens want “an internet that is fast, open, and fair.”
“It is clear that Congress now needs to heed their call, take up the charge for net neutrality and put open internet principles in federal law,” Rosenworcel said.
In his own statement, Carr said the internet won’t break from a lack of net neutrality rules and that the Biden administration’s efforts to impose utilitylike regulations on the internet was overregulating instead of allowing “the internet in America to flourish.”
In the decision, Judge Richard Allen Griffin called the FCC treatment of internet companies inconsistent and the resurrected net neutrality rules part of the “FCC’s heavy-handed regulatory regime.”
The court’s ruling cites the US Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision this past June, which overturned a 1984 precedent that gave deference to federal agencies to interpret laws in areas they oversee.
The ruling doesn’t affect state laws on net neutrality in California, Colorado and Washington, The New York Times noted.
