FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says that net neutrality practices aren’t needed because the Federal Trade Commission can protect customers from broadband providers. But a imminent court case involving AT&T could strip the FTC of its regulatory influence over AT&T and similar ISPs.
A few dozen customer advocacy groups and the City of New York asked Pai to delay the net neutrality killing vote in a report today. If the FCC discharges its rules and the court case goes AT&T’s way, there would be a “‘regulatory gap’ that would leave customers utterly unprotected,” the letter said.
When reached by Ars, Pai’s office issued this announcement in response to the letter:
This is just proof that supporters of heavy-handed Internet regulations are growing more desperate by the day as their effort to defeat Chairman Pai’s plan to repair Internet freedom has stalled. The vote will move as scheduled on December 14.
Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge is not filled by Pai’s response.
“Forty institutions ask the Federal Communications Commission why, if they are relying on the FTC to protect customers, they do not do the reasonable thing and wait until the cloud over FTC jurisdiction is resolved,” Public Knowledge Senior VP Harold Feld told Ars. “The FCC’s official answer is name calling. This tells anyone occupied who is ‘fear mongering’ and who really has the interests of customers at heart.”
The court case focuses on the FTC’s attempt to punish AT&T for throttling the portable Internet connections of consumers with unlimited data plans. While the FTC is not legally able to regulate common carriers, the agency says it can regulate the non-common port portions of a company that is otherwise a common carrier.
At the time of the throttling, AT&T was a customary carrier for landline phone and mobile voice assistance but not for mobile Internet access. AT&T argued that its general carrier status prevented the FTC from governing any portion of its company, and a panel of judges at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with AT&T in August 2016.
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