How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality

by on June 19, 2019 · 1 comment

I have been covering telecom and Internet policy for almost 30 years now. During much of that time – which included a nine year stint at the Heritage Foundation — I have interacted with conservatives on various policy issues and often worked very closely with them to advance certain reforms.

If I divided my time in Tech Policy Land into two big chunks of time, I’d say the biggest tech-related policy issue for conservatives during the first 15 years I was in the business (roughly 1990 – 2005) was preventing the resurrection of the so-called Fairness Doctrine. And the biggest issue during the second 15-year period (roughly 2005 – present) was stopping the imposition of “Net neutrality” mandates on the Internet. In both cases, conservatives vociferously blasted the notion that unelected government bureaucrats should sit in judgment of what constituted “fairness” in media or “neutrality” online.

Many conservatives are suddenly changing their tune, however. President Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, have been increasingly critical of both traditional media and new tech companies in various public statements and suggested an openness to increased regulation. The President has gone after old and new media outlets alike, while Sen. Cruz (along with others like Sen. Lindsay Graham) has suggested during congressional hearings that increased oversight of social media platforms is needed, including potential antitrust action.

Meanwhile, during his short time in office, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has become one of the most vocal Internet critics on the Right. In a shockingly-worded USA Today editorial in late May, Hawley said, “social media wastes our time and resources” and is “a field of little productive value” that have only “given us an addiction economy.” He even referred to these sites as “parasites” and blamed them for a long list of social problems, leading him to suggest that, “we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared” along with various other sites and services.

Hawley’s moral panic over social media has now bubbled over into a regulatory crusade that would unleash federal bureaucrats on the Internet in an attempt to dictate “fair” speech on the Internet. He has introduced an astonishing piece of legislation aimed at undoing the liability protections that Internet providers rely upon to provide open platforms for speech and commerce. If Hawley’s absurdly misnamed new “Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act” is implemented, it would essentially combine the core elements of the Fairness Doctrine and Net Neutrality to create a massive new regulatory regime for the Internet. Continue reading →

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The net neutrality fight continues, this time in Colorado

by on June 3, 2019 · 1 comment

Two weeks ago, Gov. Polis signed a bill that generally cuts off Colorado state funds from ISPs that commit “net neutrality violations” in the state. Oddly, I’ve seen no coverage from national outlets and barely a mention from local outlets. Perhaps journalists and readers have tired from what Larry Downes has dubbed the net neutrality farce, a debate about Internet regulation that has distracted the FCC and lawmakers for over a decade.

There’s not much new in the net neutrality debate, but Colorado did tread new ground: a House amendment to allow ISPs to filter adult content barely failed, on a tied vote 32-32. Net neutrality in the US runs into First Amendment and Section 230 problems, and that amendment is the first time I’ve seen the issue raised by a state legislature.

A few thoughts on the law because in March I was invited to testify before a Colorado House committee about net neutrality, broadband, and the policy implications of the then-pending bill. I commended the bill drafters for scrupulously attempting to narrow their bill to intra-state consumer protection issues. Nevertheless, it was my view that the Colorado law, as written, wouldn’t survive judicial review if litigated.

States can have agreements with vendors and contractors and can require them to abide by certain contractual terms. However, courts have held that states cannot, as Seth Cooper has pointed out, use their contractual relationships with firms to extract concessions that are “tantamount to regulation.” State agencies cannot attempt an end-around federal laws that prevent state regulation of Internet services generally, and net neutrality regulation in particular.

My testimony:

Good afternoon. My name is Brent Skorup and I am a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I also serve on the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

It is commendable that state legislatures, governors, and cities around the country, including in Colorado, are prioritizing broadband deployment. The focus should remain on the pressing broadband issues of competition and deployment. The political battles in Washington, DC, about net neutrality, which I have observed over the past decade, have alarmingly spread to statehouses in recent months, and they will distract from far more important issues.

Lawmakers should enter the debate with their eyes wide open about the stakes and the unintended effects of internet regulation. By imposing network management rules on certain providers, SB 19-078 conflicts with federal policy, codified in the Telecommunications Act, that internet access should be “unfettered by Federal or State regulation.”

First, net neutrality laws and regulations do not accomplish what they purportedly accomplish. As the FCC revealed when it defended its net neutrality regulations in federal court in 2016, any no-blocking rule is mostly unenforceable. As a tech journalist put it, internet service providers (ISPs) can “exempt [themselves] from the net neutrality rules”—the rules are “essentially voluntary.” The same problem arises with state net neutrality laws.

Second, state internet regulations are unlikely to survive judicial review. Internet access is inherently interstate: simply streaming a YouTube video or sending an email often transmits data across state lines. State attempts to regulate treatment of internet access therefore likely violate federal law, which vests authority to regulate interstate communications with the FCC.

Third, the bill penalizes small, rural carriers. There’s a saying in politics: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” It appears that Colorado’s rural broadband providers are “on the menu.” The bill applies internet regulations only to companies receiving state support (13 companies, each one serving rural areas). With the exception of CenturyLink, these are very small telecommunications companies, and the smallest had 64 customers. It is a puzzle why the state would add regulations and compliance costs to rural ISPs at a time when the FCC and most states are doing everything possible to help deploy broadband in rural areas.

This is not a plea to “do nothing” in Colorado regarding broadband. The FCC’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee has several recommendations for states and localities to improve broadband deployment.

Further, the FCC and some states are considering making it easier for private property owners to install wireless antennas without local regulation and fees, much like how satellite dishes are installed.

Finally, the legislature could also urge flexibility from the FCC regarding the federal high-cost fund, which disburses about $60 million annually to carriers in Colorado. My preliminary estimates using FCC data suggest that, under a new voucher program, every rural household in Colorado could receive $15 to $20 per month to reduce their monthly broadband bill.

Testimony on the Mercatus website here.

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If you’re worried about net neutrality, put your reputation on the line and make a prediction about the future

by on December 17, 2018 · 1 comment

It is now been a year since network neutrality rules supported by Title II were officially repealed, marking the end of the Obama-era legislation. Writing in Wired, Klint Finley noted that, “The good news is that the internet isn’t drastically different than it was before. But that’s also the bad news: The net wasn’t always so neutral to begin with.”

At the time, many worried what would happen. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps suggested that two worlds were possible. “Will consumers and citizens control their online experiences, or will a few gigantic gatekeepers take this dynamic technology down the road of centralized control, toll booths and constantly rising prices for consumers?”
Continue reading →

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Net neutrality is dead. Long live net neutrality.

by on December 14, 2018 · 0 comments

One year ago, the FCC majority passed the 2017 Restoring Internet Freedom Order, largely overturning the 2015 Open Internet Order. I consider the 2017 Order the most significant FCC action in a generation. The FCC did a rare thing for an agency—it voluntarily narrowed its authority to regulate a powerful and massive industry.

In addition to returning authority to the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, the 2017 Order restored common-sense regulatory humility, despite the court’s blessing the Obama FCC’s unconvincing, expansive interpretation of FCC authority. National policy, codified in law, is that the Internet and Internet services should be “unfettered by Federal or State regulation,” which, if it means anything, means Internet services cannot be regulated as common carriers.

Net neutrality is dead

Net neutrality advocates who want the FCC to have common carriage powers over Internet applications and networking practices were outraged by the approval of the 2017 Order. Joe Kane at R Street has a good roundup of some of the death-of-the-Internet hyperbole from the political class and advocates. Some disturbed net neutrality supporters took it too far, including threats to the lives and families of the Republican commissioners, especially Chairman Pai.

But the 2017 Order hadn’t killed net neutrality. It was already dead. A few hours after the passage of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, I was on a net neutrality panel in DC for an event about the First Amendment and the Internet. (One of my co-panelists dropped out out of caution because of the credible bomb threat at the FCC that day.) I pointed out at that event that while you wouldn’t know it from the news coverage, the Obama FCC had already killed net neutrality’s core principle—the prohibition against content blocking. The 2015 “net neutrality” Order allowed ISPs to block content. Attributing things to the 2015 Order that it simply doesn’t do is what Commissioner Carr has called the “Title II head fake.” The 2017 Order simply freed ISPs and app companies to invest and innovate without fear of plodding scrutiny and inconclusive findings from a far-off FCC bureau.

Long live net neutrality

The net neutrality movement will live on, however. The main net neutrality proponents aren’t that concerned with ISP content blocking; they want FCC regulation of the Internet companies and new media. It’s no coincidence that most of the prominent net neutrality advocates come out of the media access movement, which urged the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, equal time laws, and programming mandates for TV and radio broadcasts.

The newer net neutrality coalition, as then-FCC Chairman Wheeler conceded frankly, doesn’t know precisely what Internet regulation would look like. What they do know is that ISPs and Internet companies are operating with inadequate public supervision and government design. 

As Public Knowledge CEO Gene Kimmelman has said, the 2015 Order was about threatening the industry with vague but severe rules: “Legal risk and some ambiguity around what practices will be deemed ‘unreasonably discriminatory’ have been effective tools to instill fear for the last 20 years” for the telecom industry. Title II functions, per Kimmelman, as a “way[] to keep the shadow and the fear of ‘going too far’ hanging over the dominant ISPs.” Internet regulation advocates, he said at the time, “have to have fight after fight over every claim of discrimination, of new service or not.”

So it’s Internet regulation, not strict net neutrality, that is driving the movement. As former Obama administration and FCC adviser Kevin Werbach said last year, “It’s not just broadband providers that are fundamental public utilities, at some level Google is, at some level Facebook is, at some level Amazon is.” 

Fortunately, because of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, IP networks and apps companies have a few years of regulatory reprieve at a critical time. Net neutrality was invented in 2003 and draws on common carriage principles that cannot be applied sensibly to the various services carried on IP networks. Unlike the “single app” phone network regulated with common carriage, these networks transmit thousands of services and apps–like VoIP, gaming, conferencing, OTT video, IPTV, VoLTE, messaging, and Web–that require various technologies, changing topologies, and different quality-of-service requirements. 5G wireless will only accelerate the service differentiation that is at severe tension with net neutrality norms.

Rather than distract agency staff and the Internet industry with metaphysical debates about “reasonable network” practices, the Trump FCC has prioritized network investment, spectrum access, and rural broadband. Hopefully the next year is like the last.

Addendum: The net neutrality reprieve has not only freed up FCC staff to work on more pressing matters, it’s freed  up my time to write about tech policy areas that the public will benefit from. In November I published a Mercatus working paper and a Wall Street Journal op-ed about flying car policy.

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Does net neutrality increase online freedom?

by on November 8, 2018 · 2 comments

Until recently, I wasn’t familiar with Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net reports. Freedom House has useful recommendations for Internet non-regulation and for protecting freedom of speech. Their Freedom on the Net Reports make an attempt at grading a complex subject: national online freedoms.

However, their latest US report came to my attention. Tech publications like TechCrunch and Internet regulation advocates were trumpeting the report because it touched on net neutrality. Freedom House penalized the US score in the US report because the FCC a few months ago repealed the so-called net neutrality rules from 2015.

The authors of the US report reached a curious conclusion: Internet deregulation means a loss of online freedom. In 2015, the FCC classified Internet services as a “Title II” common carrier service. In 2018, the FCC, reversed course, and shifted Internet services from one of the most-regulated industries in the US to one of least-regulated industries. This 2018 deregulation, according to the Freedom House US report, creates an “obstacle to access” and, while the US is still “free,” regulation repeal moves the US slightly in the direction of “digital authoritarianism.”   Continue reading →

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Here’s why state net neutrality laws may encourage ISP filtering

by on August 28, 2018 · 3 comments

A few states have passed Internet regulations because the Trump FCC, citing a 20 year US policy of leaving the Internet “unfettered by Federal or State regulation,” decided to reverse the Obama FCC’s 2015 decision to regulate the Internet with telephone laws.

Those state laws regulating Internet traffic management practices–which supporters call “net neutrality”–are unlikely to survive lawsuits because the Internet and Internet services are clearly interstate communications and FCC authority dominates. (The California bill also likely violates federal law concerning E-Rate-funded Internet access.) 

However, litigation can take years. In the meantime ISP operators will find they face fewer regulatory headaches if they do exactly what net neutrality supporters believe the laws prohibit: block Internet content. Net neutrality laws in the US don’t apply to ISPs that “edit the Internet.”

The problem for net neutrality supporters is that Internet service providers, like cable TV providers, are protected by the First Amendment. In fact, Internet regulations with a nexus to content are subject to “strict scrutiny,” which typically means regulations are struck down. Even leading net neutrality proponents, like the ACLU and EFF, endorse the view that ISP curation is expressive activity protected by First Amendment.

As I’ve pointed out, these First Amendment concerns were raised during the 2016 litigation and compelled the Obama FCC to clarify that its 2015 “net neutrality” Order allows ISPs to block content. As a pro-net neutrality journalist recently wrote in TechCrunch about the 2015 rules,  

[A] tiny ISP in Texas called Alamo . . . wanted to offer a “family-friendly” edited subset of the internet to its customers. Funnily enough, this is permitted! And by publicly stating that it has no intention of providing access to “substantially all Internet endpoints,” Alamo would exempt itself from the net neutrality rules! Yes, you read that correctly — an ISP can opt out of the rules by changing its business model. They are . . . essentially voluntary.

The author wrote this to ridicule Judge Kavanaugh, but the joke is clearly not on Kavanuagh.

In fact, under the 2015 Order, filtered Internet service was less regulated than conventional Internet service. Note that the rules were “essentially voluntary”–ISPs could opt out of regulation by filtering content. The perverse incentive of this regulatory asymmetry, whereby the FCC would regulate conventional broadband heavily but not regulate filtered Internet at all, was cited by the Trump FCC as a reason to eliminate the 2015 rules. 

State net neutrality laws basically copy and paste from the 2015 FCC regulations and will have the same problem: Any ISP that forthrightly blocks content it doesn’t wish to transmit–like adult content–and edits the Internet is unregulated.

This looks bad for net neutrality proponents leading the charge, so they often respond that the Internet regulations cover the “functional equivalent” of conventional (heavily regulated) Internet access. Therefore, the story goes, regulators can stop an ISP from filtering because an edited Internet is the functional equivalent of an unedited Internet.

Curiously, the Obama FCC didn’t make this argument in court. The reason the Obama FCC didn’t endorse this “functional equivalent” response is obvious. Let’s play this out: An ISP markets and offers a discounted “clean Internet” package because it knows that many consumers would appreciate it. To bring the ISP back into the regulated category, regulators sue, drag the ISP operators into court, and tell judges that state law compels the operator to transmit adult content.

This argument would receive a chilly reception in court. More likely is that state regulators, in order to preserve some authority to regulate the Internet, will simply concede that filtered Internet drops out of regulation, like the Obama FCC did.

As one telecom scholar wrote in a Harvard Law publication years ago, “net neutrality” is dead in the US unless there’s a legal revolution in the courts.  Section 230 of the Telecom Act encourages ISPs to filter content and the First Amendment protects ISP curation of the Internet. State law can’t change that. The open Internet has been a net positive for society. However, state net neutrality laws may have the unintended effect of encouraging ISPs to filter. This is not news if you follow the debate closely, but rank-and-file net neutrality advocates have no idea. The top fear of leading net neutrality advocates is not ISP filtering, it’s the prospect that the Internet–the most powerful media distributor in history–will escape the regulatory state.

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Why Women Should Love the “Net Neutrality” Repeal

by on June 11, 2018 · 1 comment

The Internet is a great tool for women’s empowerment, because it gives us the freedom to better our lives in ways that previously far more limited. Today, the FCC’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order helped the Internet become even freer.

There is a lot of misinformation and scare tactics about the previous administration’s so-called “net neutrality” rules. But the Obama-era Open Internet Order regulations were not neutral at all. Rather, they ham-handedly forced Internet Service Providers (ISPs) into a Depression-era regulatory classification known as a Title II common carrier. This would have slowed Internet dynamism, and with it, opportunities for women.

Today’s deregulatory move by the FCC reverses that decision, which will allow more ISPs to enter the market. More players in the market make Internet service better, faster, cheaper, and more wildly available. This is especially good for women who have especially benefited from the increased connectivity and flexibility that the Internet has provided.

Continue reading →

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No, “83% of Americans” do not support the 2015 net neutrality regulations

by on May 15, 2018 · 1 comment

Lawmakers frequently hear impressive-sounding stats about net neutrality like “83% of voters support keeping FCC’s net neutrality rules.”   This 83% number (and similar “75% of Republicans support the rules”) is based on a survey from the Program for Public Consultation released in December 2017, right before the FCC voted to repeal the 2015 Internet regulations.

These numbers should be treated with skepticism. This survey generates these high approval numbers by asking about net neutrality “rules” found nowhere in the 2015 Open Internet Order. The released survey does not ask about the substance of the Order, like the Title II classification, government price controls online, or the FCC’s newly-created authority to approve of and disapprove of new Internet services.

Here’s how the survey frames the issue:

Under the current regulations, ISPs are required to:    provide customers access to all websites on the internet.    provide equal access to all websites without giving any websites faster or slower download speeds.  

The survey then essentially asks the participant if they favor these “regulations.” The nearly 400-page Order is long and complex and I’m guessing the survey creators lacked expertise in this area because this is a serious misinterpretation of the Order. This framing is how net neutrality advocates discuss the issue, but the Obama FCC’s interpretations of the 2015 Order look nothing like these survey questions. Exaggeration and misinformation is common when discussing net neutrality and unfortunately these pollsters contributed to it. (The Washington Post Fact Checker column recently assigned “Three Pinocchios” to similar net neutrality advocate claims.)

Let’s break down these rules ostensibly found in the 2015 Order.

“ISPs are required to provide customers access to all websites on the internet”

This is wrong. The Obama FCC was quite clear in the 2015 Order and during litigation that ISPs are free to filter the Internet and block websites. From the oral arguments:

FCC lawyer: “If [ISPs] want to curate the Internet…that would drop them out of the definition of Broadband Internet Access Service.” Judge Williams: “They have that option under the Order?” FCC lawyer: “Absolutely, your Honor. …If they filter the Internet and don’t provide access to all or substantially all endpoints, then…the rules don’t apply to them.”

As a result, the judges who upheld the Order said, “The Order…specifies that an ISP remains ‘free to offer ‘edited’ services’ without becoming subject to the rule’s requirements.”

Further, in the 1996 Telecom Act, Congress gave Internet access providers legal protection in order to encourage them to block lewd and “objectionable content.” Today, many ISPs offer family-friendly Internet access that blocks, say, pornographic and violent content. An FCC Order cannot and did not rewrite the Telecom Act and cannot require “access to all websites on the internet.”

“ISPs are required to provide equal access to all websites without giving any websites faster or slower download speeds”

Again, wrong. There is no “equal access to all websites” mandate (see above). Further, the 2015 Order allows ISPs to prioritize certain Internet traffic because preventing prioritization online would break Internet services.

This myth–that net neutrality rules require ISPs to be dumb pipes, treating all bits the same–has been circulated for years but is derided by networks experts. MIT computer scientist and early Internet developer David Clark colorfully dismissed this idea as “happy little bunny rabbit dreams.”  He pointed out that prioritization has been built into Internet protocols for years and “[t]he network is not neutral and never has been.” 

Other experts, such as tech entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban and President Obama’s former chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra, have observed that the need for Internet “fast lanes” as Internet services grow more diverse. Further, the nature of interconnection agreements and content delivery networks mean that some websites pay for and receive better service than others.

This is not to say the Order is toothless. It authorizes government price controls and invents a vague “general conduct standard” that gives the agency broad authority to reject, favor, and restrict new Internet services. The survey, however, declined to ask members of the public about the substance of the 2015 rules and instead asked about support for net neutrality slogans that have only a tenuous relationship with the actual rules.

“Net neutrality” has always been about giving the FCC, the US media regulator, vast authority to regulate the Internet.  In doing so, the 2015 Order rejects the 20-year policy of the United States, codified in law, that the Internet and Internet services should be “unfettered by Federal or State regulation.” The US tech and telecom sector thrived before 2015 and the 2017 repeal of the 2015 rules will reinstate, fortunately, that light-touch regulatory regime.

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Doomed to fail: “net neutrality” state laws

by on February 20, 2018 · 1 comment

Internet regulation advocates lost their fight at the FCC, which voted in December 2017 to rescind the 2015 Open Internet Order. Regulation advocates have now taken their “net neutrality” regulations to the states.

Some state officials–via procurement contracts, executive order, or legislation–are attempting to monitor and regulate traffic management techniques and Internet service provider business models in the name of net neutrality. No one, apparently, told these officials that government-mandated net neutrality principles are dead in the US.

As the litigation over the 2015 rules showed, o ur national laissez faire policy towards the Internet and our First Amendment guts any attempt to enforce net neutrality.  Recall that the 1996 amendments to the Communications Act announce a clear national policy about the Internet: Continue reading →

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Here’s why the Obama FCC Internet regulations don’t protect net neutrality

by on July 12, 2017 · 3 comments

It’s becoming clearer why, for six years out of eight, Obama’s appointed FCC chairmen resisted regulating the Internet with Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. Chairman Wheeler famously did not want to go that legal route. It was only after President Obama and the White House called on the FCC in late 2014 to use Title II that Chairman Wheeler relented. If anything, the hastily-drafted 2015 Open Internet rules provide a new incentive to ISPs to curate the Internet in ways they didn’t want to before. 

The 2016 court decision upholding the rules was a Pyrrhic victory for the net neutrality movement. In short, the decision revealed that the 2015 Open Internet Order provides no meaningful net neutrality protections–it allows ISPs to block and throttle content. As the judges who upheld the Order said, “The Order…specifies that an ISP remains ‘free to offer ‘edited’ services’ without becoming subject to the rule’s requirements.” 

The 2014 White House pressure didn’t occur in a vacuum. It occurred immediately after Democratic losses in the November 2014 midterms. As Public Knowledge president Gene Kimmelman tells it, President Obama needed to give progressives “a clean victory for us to show that we are standing up for our principles.” The slapdash legal finessing that followed was presaged by President Obama’s November 2014 national address urging Title II  classification of the Internet, which cites the wrong communications law on the Obama White House website to this day.

The FCC staff did their best with what they were given but the resulting Order was aimed at political symbolism and acquiring jurisdiction to regulate the Internet, not meaningful “net neutrality” protections. As internal FCC emails produced in a Senate majority report show, Wheeler’s reversal that week caught the non-partisan career FCC staff off guard. Literally overnight FCC staff had to scrap the “hybrid” (non-Title II) order they’d been carefully drafting for weeks and scrape together a legal justification for using Title II. This meant calling in advocates to enhance the record and dubious citations to the economics literature.  Former FCC chief economist, Prof. Michael Katz, whose work was cited in the Order, later stated to Forbes that he suspected the “ FCC cited my papers as an inside joke, because they know how much I think net neutrality is a bad idea.” 

Applying 1934 telegraph and telephone laws to the Internet was always going to have unintended consequences, but the politically-driven Order increasingly looks like an own-goal, even to supporters. Former FCC chief technologist, Jon Peha, who supports Title II classification of ISPs almost immediately raised the alarm that the Order offered “massive loopholes” to ISPs that could make the rules irrelevant.  This was made clear when the FCC attorney defending the Order in court acknowledged that ISPs are free to block and filter content and escape the Open Internet regulations and Title II. These concessions  from the FCC surprised even AT&T VP Hank Hultquist:

Wow. ISPs are not only free to engage in content-based blocking, they can even create the long-dreaded fast and slow lanes so long as they make their intentions sufficiently clear to customers.

So the Open Internet Order not only permits the net neutrality “nightmare scenario,” it provides an incentive to ISPs to curate the Internet. Despite the activist PR surrounding the Order, so-called “fast lanes”–like carrier-provided VoIP, VoLTE, and IPTV–have existed for years and the FCC rules allow them.  The Order permits ISP blocking, throttling, and “fast lanes”–what remains of “net neutrality”?

Prof. Susan Crawford presciently warned in 2005: 

I have lost faith in our ability to write about code in words, and I’m confident that any attempt at writing down network neutrality will be so qualified, gutted, eviscerated, and emptied that it will end up being worse than useless.

Aside from some religious ISPs, ISPs don’t want to filter Internet content. But the Obama FCC, via the “net neutrality” rules, gives them a new incentive: the Order deregulates ISPs that filter. ISPs will fight the rules because they want to continue to offer their conventional Internet service without submitting to the Title II baggage. This is why ISPs favor scrapping the Order–not only is it the FCC’s first claim to regulate Internet access, if the rules are not repealed, ISPs will be compelled to make difficult decisions about their business models and technologies in the future.

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