Three days after California Governor Jerry Brown signed the state’s new, expansive net neutrality bill into law, and the United States Justice Department immediately sued to block the law, as AVN.com reported, the state was hit with a new lawsuit over net neutrality—this one from a consortium of lobbying groups representing the biggest and most powerful telecommunications companies that control internet access for millions of Americans.
On Wednesday, four industry lobbying organizations—mobile communications group CTIA, cable industry consortium NCTA, the telecommunications lobbyist organization USTelecom, and the American Cable Association—filed a lawsuit in a federal district court in Sacramento.
“This case presents a classic example of unconstitutional state regulation,” the lawsuit said, adding that in passing the new net neutrality bill guaranteeing that internet service providers treat all online traffic equally, California “purposefully intended to countermand and undermine federal law by imposing ... the very same regulations that the Federal Communications Commission expressly repealed in its 2018 Restoring Internet Freedom Order (and by adopting even more restrictive regulations), despite the fact that both the FCC decision and the federal Communications Act of 1934 prohibit states from taking such action.”
As in the earlier Justice Department lawsuit, the internet companies are asking the court to hand down an injunction against the net neutrality law taking effect, which would otherwise be scheduled to happen on January 1, 2019, according to the tech news site Ars Technica.
Telecommunications lawyer Pantelis Michalopoulos, who specializes in net neutrality law, told CNN that he sees little chance for the lawsuits to succeed.
"These attempts at getting a preliminary injunction seem weak and are likely to fail for the same reasons that the Internet Service Provider [ISP] industry was unable to obtain a stay of the FCC's former net neutrality rules in 2015," he told the network. "The Internet Service Providers offer speculative theories about why they will suffer irreparable injury. These theories do not appear to satisfy the test for a preliminary injunction."
California State Senator Scott Wiener, who authored the state’s net neutrality law, said that the lawsuits were expected.
"The internet service providers have every right to sue California, just like California has every right, indeed an obligation, to protect our residents' access to an open internet," Wiener told CNN.
The Justice Department and FCC Chair Ajit Pai have called the California law “illegal,” saying that order repealing the 2015 federal net neutrality rules “pre-empted” states from imposing their own open internet rules. But experts say that in giving up its own authority to regulate the internet, the FCC effectively gave states a free hand.
“When the FCC repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order, it said it had no power to regulate broadband internet access providers,” Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick told news site The Verge. “That means the FCC cannot prevent the states from adopting net neutrality protections because the FCC’s repeal order removed its authority to adopt such protections.”
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