A federal appeals court on Friday upheld California’s net neutrality law, rejecting an attempt by broadband industry trade groups to prevent the state from …
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld California’s net neutrality law, rejecting an attempt by broadband industry trade groups to prevent the state from enforcing it. The ruling is the latest twist in a decades-long battle to put in place rules of the road for the internet. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a 3-0 vote upheld a previous ruling, which means the state can continue to enforce the law. California adopted the new rules in 2018 after a Republican-led Federal Communications Commission in 2017 repealed federal rules that had been established under President Barack Obama. Telecom and broadband industry groups had sued to get the state law thrown out, arguing that since federal net neutrality protections were dismantled, the state had no jurisdiction to regulate broadband service. But the court ruled that since the FCC as part of its repeal of net neutrality protections reclassified broadband as an information service rather than telecommunications service, it abdicated its authority and therefore couldn’t preempt a state law, which included the 2018 California law, SB-822. «The FCC can not preempt SB-822 because it gave up its full regulatory authority by reclassifying broadband as a Title I information service,» the court said. California’s law, which codifies federal protections that were thrown out in 2017, bans internet service providers from slowing down or blocking access to websites or applications. It also prohibits broadband companies from charging fees to companies to deliver their service faster than a competitor’s service. It also goes further than the Obama-era FCC net neutrality protections and also prohibits practices such as zero-rating, which is the bundling of access to certain content or services for free as part of broadband service. An example of such a service is a promotion once offered by AT&T, which exempted its own streaming services from its wireless customers’ data caps.
