Despite Court Ruling, DOJ Moves to Stop California Net Neutrality

LOS ANGELES—In a wide-ranging decision issued last October, a federal appeals court in Washington D.C. upheld the 2018 repeal of net neutrality rules by the Federal Communications Commission — but also knocked back the FCC’s claim that individual states are barred from imposing their own net neutrality regulations. Net neutrality is the principle requiring that internet service providers treat all online traffic equally and fairly, neither speeding up or slowing down data transmission from specific online sites. The FCC, in its order repealing the rules, asserted that its authority to do so was all-encompassing, forbidding states from drafting their own net neutrality rules, as California and 10 other states had already done. But the District of Columbia Court of Appeals disagreed. In a 200-page ruling, a three-judge panel said that the FCC had overstepped its authority by trying to impose its own aversion to net neutrality on the states. The Mozilla Foundation, which brought the lawsuit against the FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules, cited the court’s green light to states as its reason for dropping the two-year court battle, rather than appealing to the Supreme Court. On Wednesday, however, the U.S. Department of Justice appeared to ignore the court’s ruling, asking the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California to place an injunction on California, preventing the state from putting its own net neutrality law into place, according to an Ars Technica report.  California enacted what is believed to be the country’s toughest state-level net neutrality law in September of 2018 — but agreed not to enforce the law until the Mozilla lawsuit had reached a final decision. In its filing, the DOJ accused California of seeking “to second-guess the Federal Government's regulatory approach,” which the D.C. court’s ruling appeared to expressly permit the state to do. But the DOJ also said that the court made that ruling only “because it found the FCC lacked authority to expressly preempt all state regulation of intrastate broadband.” The federal filing went on to claim that “the court recognized that some state laws could conflict with, and be preempted by" the FCC’s net neutrality repeal. According to a Reuters report, the California Attorney General’s office said it would review the DOJ’s request, and that it would “look forward to defending California’s state net neutrality protections.” But according to the report by Ars Technica, the state will likely argue that the FCC’s order reclassifying the internet as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service” shifted responsibility for regulating the internet at all to the Federal Trade Commission, taking the FCC itself out of the picture. The Eastern District court is not expected to rule on the DOJ request at least until October. Photo By Slowking / Wikimedia Commons