Court: No Internet Control for FCC

RUSH: The regime is not going to be happy about this next story. ‘The Federal Communications Commission does not have the legal authority to slap Net neutrality regulations on Internet providers, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. A three-judge panel in Washington, DC unanimously tossed out the FCC’s August 2008 cease and desist order against Comcast, which had taken measures to slow BitTorrent transfers and had voluntarily ended them earlier that year,’ and the FCC didn’t like that. They don’t want Internet providers being able to regulate any aspect of who gets to see what via their website. There’s a lot of confusion about what net neutrality is. I remember I had a conversation not long ago with a high government official about this. I explained on the program here what it is. And I was bombarded with e-mail from, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Net neutrality has nothing to do with what you’re talking about.’ And it does. Basically, Internet providers are supposed to treat all Internet content equally.

In the case of Comcast, the government didn’t like the fact that they did not make BitTorrent available to their subscribers. BitTorrent is a file transfer protocol that huge files, some of them not legal in terms of copyright and this sort of thing, are downloaded and uploaded and so forth, and it poses virus risks and a number of other things. And so Comcast, for whatever reason, if not those, ‘We don’t want to have BitTorrent available here,’ for a whole bunch of reasons. And the FCC, ‘You can’t do that,’ so they went to court over it. The court is saying the FCC ‘has failed to tie its assertion’ of regulatory authority to any actual law enacted by Congress, the agency does not have the authority to regulate an Internet provider’s network management practices, wrote Judge David Tatel … Even though liberal advocacy groups had urged the FCC to take action against Comcast, the agency’s vote to proceed was a narrow 3-2, with the dissenting commissioners predicting at the time that it would not hold up in court. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Republican, said at the time that the FCC’s ruling was unlawful and the lack of legal authority ‘is sure to doom this order on appeal.”

Now, there are great ramifications for this. This decision could doom something recently announced by Julius Genachowski, the new chairman of the FCC, which was a national broadband policy. Right now the FCC does not have any regulatory authority over the Internet, and they don’t have any over cable TV. They have it over broadcast. They have it over-the-air cell phone transmissions, television and that kind of thing, but they don’t have it over the Internet and yet they asserted control. And the court said, ‘You don’t have regulatory authority here. There’s no law granting you this.’ Well, that will be taken care of pretty soon because the regime wants to control everything, particularly Internet content. They want to make sure that what has happened here to talk radio does not happen to the Internet. They want to make sure that their point of view doesn’t get snuffed out by the marketplace, which it has here on talk radio. Despite their best efforts, liberals simply have failed to score anything significant in talk radio on the air, and the regime is very unhappy about that.

There have been numerous attempts by some of the most supposedly competent, superstar liberals in the history of the country, and still, they get an asterisk as a rating point. Look at CNN. One day a couple weeks ago in the 25 to 54 demographic, Anderson Cooper, 25,000 viewers in an hour. Twenty-five thousand people in the whole country, that’s all, were watching CNN. My friends, I, on this program, have 25,000 viewers at the corner of 60th and Madison in New York City. The regime does not want the same thing happening to the Internet, and the net neutrality was to make sure that Internet providers made equal content available to anybody visiting through their portal.