Here Are The Judges Who Will Decide Landmark Net Neutrality Case

With the first oral arguments in what promises to be a landmark case in the fight for—or against—net neutrality scheduled for February 1, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Wednesday announced the three-judge panel that will decide the case, according to The Washington Post, and they include two judges appointed by Democratic presidents, while the third was named to the bench by Republican Ronald Reagan. For a while at least, the D.C. appeals court decision will be the final word on the lawsuit brought by the Mozilla, makers of the web browser Firefox, over whether the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of the Obama-era net neutrality rules will stand, unless until the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear the inevitable appeal of the three judges’ decision. The oral argument date may yet be postponed, however, if the two-week old government shutdown is not resolved by the end of the month. The Reagan-appointed judge who will sit on the panel will be 82-year-old Stephen F. Williams, who has served on the court since 1986, and was named the D.C. court’s Senior Judge in 2001. In a 2016 case when a coalition of big telecom companies challenged the then-still-relatively-new net neutrality rules, Williams dissented from the court’s ruling upholding the rules, as The Washington Post reported.  Judge Judith Rogers. 79, was nominated to the appeals court by President Bill Clinton in 1994. In 2014, Rogers sat on the three-judge panel that upheld the FCC’s right to impose net neutrality rules—though rejecting the rules that were then in place because they were put in place under regulations defining the internet as an “information service,” a type of service that is generally not subject to more than minimal government regulation.    But the court at that time said that if the FCC defined the internet as a “common carrier,” the net neutrality regulations would likely stand. It was under “Title II,” the “common carrier” provision, that the FCC under President Barack Obama imposed the rules in 2015—the set of rules repealed by the Republican dominated FCC last year. The final judge who will hear the net neutrality lawsuit appeal will be 55-year-old Patricia Millett, who was named to the court by Obama in 2013. While Millett appears not to have yet heard a net neutrality-related case, she has ruled to block a corporate merger, is known as a strong advocate for abortion rights, and was called “a worthy successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg” by Slate.com. AgnosticPreachersKid/Wikimedia Commons