Analysis: FCC should undo '02 error to ensure net neutrality

[unhappycamper]

http://www.mysanantonio.com/technology/article/Analysis-FCC-should-undo-02-error-to-ensure-net-5154104.php

Analysis: FCC should undo '02 error to ensure net neutrality
Brendan Greeley : January 17, 2014

The Federal Communications Commission is sitting on a mess. Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., decided in Verizon Communications vs. the FCC that the commission didn't have the authority to impose its open Internet order on Verizon or anyone else.

There is a simple fix for this mess. It does not require any new laws from Congress. It already has the support of the Supreme Court.

If the FCC actually wants to ensure net neutrality, it will have do something that every regulator in every other developed country did a long time ago. (It will also turn Verizon litigiously apoplectic.) It has to unmake the mistake it made in 2002, when it failed to classify cable Internet providers as telecommunications services. Doing so will solve everything.

The last major piece of internet law, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, gave the FCC the authority to regulate Internet service providers as either telecommunications services, which transmit data, or information services, which process data. Early in the 2000s, the cable industry argued that it not only transmitted Internet data to customers, it also provided e-mail addresses and Web pages - it processed data as well. Because cable companies were therefore both telecommunication and information services, the industry argued, it could only possibly be an information service.

[vi5]

1. "If the FCC actually wants to ensure net neutrality"

That's the thing. They don't. This last round of basically taking a dive should have put to rest any notions that this wasn't the case. Like everything else, big moneyed interests and what they want take priority over everything else, even in this Democratic administration.