US rules out net neutrality lawsuit against California

The U.S. Department of Justice has gave up his Trump era process against California enacting its own net neutrality rules.

The news, spotted by Ars Technicameans tthe federal government is to let the state do what it wants when it comes to net neutrality, which is in align with Biden ANmanagement’s promise to reinstate laws at the federal level. Federal Communications Commission Acting President Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement that she is “satisfied” with the turn of events.

The California Internet Consumer Protection Act and Internet Neutrality was signed into law on September 30, 2018, in response to FCC move to revoke net neutrality. Designed to fill the gap left by the FCC led by Ajit Pai, the law prevents Internet service providers from: blocking and decelerating legal traffic; forhelp prioritization of service; getting paid for zero-classify some content in a category, but not all content in that category (looking at you, AT&T); and not be transparent about network management practices, performance and business terms.

Hours after the law went into effect, the Trump era DOJ filed a lawsuit against California, claiming that states have no jurisdiction over the Internet. As a result, California agreed not to enforce the law in exchange for the DOJ not proceeding with the process. In August last year, the Trump administration resumed its lawsuit against California, but the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC could not force individual states to maintain the repeal of network neutrality – theAlthough he said that the FCC could repeal its own net neutrality rules, unfortunately. The court maintained the claim that broadband is not a telecommunications service, somehow not convinced by millions of people working and attending school at home due to the covid-19 pandemic.

Now that the lawsuit has been formally closed, however, it leaves California in a position to actually enforce the law it passed two years ago.

But there is another obstacle: the ISPs. Several major lobbying groups representing some of the largest US telecommunications companies – Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Cox, Frontier and CenturyLink – presented a separate process against the state in October 2018, calling the act an example of “unconstitutional state regulation” and which undermined federal law. Lobbying groups changed their process in August last year.

It is unclear what or how much legal precedence this argument still has, considering that the DOJ has already formally withdrawn its lawsuit against California. And with Rosenworcel currently in charge of the FCC, it is entirely possible that the neutrality of the network will be restored. All of this combined seems to make broadband lobbyists’ argument debatable. However, President Biden would need to appoint a new Democratic commissioner and have that nomination passed by the Senate to break the 2-2 impasse between Democrats and Republicans at the FCC.