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The Recent Court and Regulatory Battles Behind the Net Neutrality Controversy

By Barry Skidelsky
February 01, 2018

Though it has been a news focus recently, the legal issue of “net neutrality,” or an open Internet, has been a point of contention between Internet access providers and network users since the mid-1990s. Both sides have zealously but unsuccessfully lobbied Congress with multiple efforts to have desired legislation passed. This has left us instead with shifting regulatory actions taken by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) attempting to address the issue.

Most recently, the FCC's vote to roll-back the Obama administration's pro-net neutrality rules and policies warrants some legal history to better understand the issue, where we are right now, and where we are headed — all while communications, copyright and other law continues to struggle to adapt to technological advancements in the digital era.

The 2016 panel decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in U.S. Telecom Association v. FCC, 825 F.3d 674 (D.C. Cir. 2016), lays out some history of Internet regulation and the last few battles in this war, starting with a statement that this case was the third time in seven years that the court confronted an effort by the FCC to compel Internet openness — the net neutrality principle that broadband Internet access 's must treat all Internet traffic the same regardless of source.

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