Landmark Net Neutrality Lawsuit Finally Gets Court Hearing Friday

In what could prove to be one of the most significant days in the history of the internet, a landmark lawsuit challenging the Federal Communications Commission elimination of net neutrality protections gets its day in court on Friday. The lawsuit brought by Mozilla, developers of the open-source web browser Firefox, and other internet entities and rights groups seeks to reinstate the 2015 open internet rules, which were tossed out by the Republican-dominated FCC last June, after a party-line vote to kill net neutrality the previous December. In an unusual development that would appear to indicate the importance of the case, oral arguments in the lawsuit are the only item on the United States District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia docket for Friday, and each side—the FCC and the open internet advocates—will receive 75-minute time allotments to make their respective cases. In most cases before the D.C. Appeals Court, each side is granted 20 minutes to deliver oral arguments. The hearing in Mozilla Corporation v. FCC is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, and audio will be streamed live on the court’s website.  As AVN.com reported, the three judge panel assigned to the case included two judges appointed by Democratic presidents—one by Bill Clinton and the second by Barack Obama—and a Ronald Reagan appointee. But the Clinton appointee, 79-year-old Judith Rogers, has since withdrawn from the case for unspecified reasons, according to a report by Multichannel.com, and has been replaced by 55-year-old Obama appointee Robert L. Wilkins. One lawyer familiar with the court told Multichannel that while Wilkins and Rogers come from similar ideological positions, Wilkins is considerably less experienced in handling technology-related cases. “He is very smart,” the lawyer told Multichannel. “He is more active in oral argument than Judge Rogers, so the dynamic may be slightly different in that regard.” The arguments are likely to be highly technical, with the FCC contending, according to Ars Technica, that the internet should be defined as an “information service,” a category that under the law is much less subject to government regulation.  But Mozilla lawyers will argue that the internet is properly classified as a “telecommunications service,” as it was under the Obama-era FCC—a definition that was upheld by the D.C. Appeals Court in a 2016 case, in which broadband industry groups attempted unsuccessfully to get net neutrality rules overturned.  Under FCC rules, services defined as “telecommunications” may be more strictly regulated. Photo By AgnosticPreachersKid / Wikimedia Commons