Since the DC Circuit Court threw out most of the FCC’s Open Internet Order earlier this month, the agency is now considering creating “general concept rules” that would allow it to act on a case-by-case basis. Bloomberg BNA talked to TechFreedom about the possible consequences:
TechFreedom President Berin Szoka told Bloomberg BNA that he’s concerned about the concept of a case-by-case regulatory approach to net neutrality violations.
“Critics of the agency have always talked about how the FCC should be focused on real harms and operate on a case-by-case basis, and that is exactly what Wheeler is now saying,” Szoka told Bloomberg BNA. “The difficulty, or the challenge, is that there is a third element to any approach, which is what the underlying legal standard is.
“If the underlying legal standard is a very open-ended, loose one, you could do case-by-case enforcement and you could say you are focusing on real harms and use all the right words, and yet the approach could still be quite destructive,” Szoka said. “That’s why it is essential that the commission not just use words like anticompetitive, but actually define those terms in a real way.”
Read the full article, and check out our other work on Net Neutrality — especially our op-ed in Wired.