Net Neutrality: "Obama and the FCC are too scared of their money and influence to fight for you"
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The FCC could very easily recover from this decision.
The agency could decide to properly re-regulate ISPs by issuing a rule finding that reverses the de-regulation of the Bush era.
The Supreme Court is very clear on this. When the de-regulation happened, the FCC’s decision was fought by a company called Brand X, which relied on the regulations to provide internet service.
The Supreme Court ruled that the FCC’s decision to un-regulate wasn’t necessarily the best interpretation of the law, but that the FCC had the unilateral power to decide whether something was a telecom service (like the phone company) or an “information service” (like a Bloomberg terminal.)
The flip-side of that ruling is that the Supreme Court made it very clear that the FCC could, if it had the will and political capital, simply decide to reverse itself.
The first Obama FCC chief, Julius Genachowski, declined to do so and instead presided over a two-year, Bill Clinton-esque proceeding that created some fairly weak rules built on a legal foundation made of Lincoln logs.
The new FCC chief, Tom Wheeler, is of the same persuasion and previously served as a lobbyist for the cable industry. He will not pick this fight. He may seek to draw it out with an appeals process, but he’s not going to reclassify ISPs as utilities.
That means the big telecoms, with their massive lobbying arms and campaign cash, have won.
So what’s to be done?
Tactically, ISPs have to be fought on every attempt to usurp the network.
But long term, the only way to fight Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner Cable is to build municipal fiber networks that operate on open-access principles. Google Fiber, which Google has launched in a few cities, is a frenemy to this battle...
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https://medium.com/p/4a7f7b1fcb4f
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