As bad as today’s Circuit Court ruling looks — limiting the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to regulate internet service providers and opening up the possibility that Comcast and other providers can apply different rules to different content — there may be a way around it.
According to this post by Megan Tady from the Free Press “Save the Internet Coalition,” the FCC opened itself up to this ruling through its own mistakes and failures:The FCC has found itself in the ridiculous situation of attempting to regulate broadband without the authority to do so unless the agency takes strong and decisive action to “reclassify” the service under the Communications Act.Here’s the deal: under the Bush FCC, the agency decided to classify and treat broadband Internet service providers the same as any Internet applications company like Facebook or Lexis-Nexis, placing broadband providers outside of the legal framework that traditionally applied to the companies that offer two-way communications services.That’s the loophole that let Comcast wiggle out from under the agency’s thumb.
The FCC has it within its powers, Tady says, to make “an easy fix”:
The FCC can change broadband back to a “communications service,” which is where it should have been in the first place. By reclassifying broadband, all of these questions about authority will fall away and the FCC can pick up where it left off – protecting the Internet for the public and bridging the digital divide.
The hope, she says, is that “this court decision will hopefully force the FCC to take action that will ultimately come back to haunt them.”
That’s the hope, anyway. Let’s see if Barack Obama’s FCC (pictured) is more willing to back American citizens than the Bush FCC.
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