Trump Lawsuit to Stop CA Net Neutrality Law Gets Hearing Nov. 14

California’s new net neutrality law will get its first day in court on November 14, to answer a lawsuit brought by the United States Department of Justice in what may provide the first indications of whether or not the nation’s most populous state will be permitted to protect open internet, or if the new federal rules giving more power to big telecommunications companies to determine what internet users may read, see and hear will stand up. The Donald Trump administration sued California immediately after the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, signed the new net neutrality bill into law on September 30. Attorney General Jeff Sessions condemned the state’s law as “extreme and illegal.” Net neutrality rules prevent big internet service providers from letting traffic from certain sites zip through the digital “pipes” at full speed, while other sites see their data blocked or slowed to a crawl. On Thursday, the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission, which repealed the Obama-era net neutrality rules effective in June, gave a preview of how it plans to attack the California law, filing a brief in a separate case with a Washington, D.C., federal court claiming that the FCC has the authority to classify internet service providers not as “telecommunications” companies, but as “information services,” which are subject to much less government regulation than “telecommunications,” a classification created for telephone companies in the era when “Ma Bell” dominated the phone market. The Obama-era rules had classified ISPs, many of which, such as AT&T and Verizon, are also telephone companies, as “telecommunications services,” allowing them to be more strictly regulated by the FCC. In the Thursday brief, according to a Washington Post analysis, the FCC also claimed the investment by the big ISPs in improving their services and networks had slowed since the 2015 net neutrality rules took effect. But in an earlier brief filed by 22 states as well as the Mozilla Corporation—maker of the web browser Firefox—net neutrality advocates scoffed at the FCC’s claim that internet investment had been stifled, saying that the Commission had no evidence to support that claim. The FCC also “disregarded the serious risk that providers will engage in abusive practices that undermine the open internet,” according to the earlier brief filed by Mozilla and the states. According to the Post, most experts expect the battle over net neutrality to end up in front of the Supreme Court, where it could be decided on a 5-4 vote with new Justice Brett Kavanaugh providing the vote that kills the open internet. In a lengthy dissenting opinion from last year, when a net neutrality lawsuit came to the D.C. Circuit Court where Kavanaugh sat, he called the rules “unlawful” and said that net neutrality “must be vacated.” Photo by Cory Doctorow / Wikimedia Commons