In a major, but not total, victory for the Donald Trump administration and its Federal Communication Commission Chair Ajit Pai—a former top lawyer for the Verizon corporation—a federal court in Washington, D.C., ruled Tuesday that the FCC was within its rights to repeal net neutrality regulations that had been in place since 2015, The New York Times reported.
But in the lawsuit spearheaded by the not-for-profit Mozilla Corporation—makers of the popular web browser Firefox—a three-judge panel on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals also said that the FCC had no justification for including a blanket ban on individual states imposing their own net neutrality regulations, leaving the door open for 11 states who have already passed various forms of net neutrality legislation or regulations, as AVN.com has reported, to put those rules into effect.
Net neutrality rules prevent internet service providers such as Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum and other giant telecom corporations from selectively blocking or slowing traffic from certain sites, while creating a data-speed “fast lane” for others—often sites owned by themselves.
For the adult industry, net neutrality provides important protections against censorship. As AVN.com has reported, the rules also prevent ISPs from charging customers premium prices for access to a package of adult sites while blocking all porn for customers who don’t pay the additional fees.
Among states that have already passed their own net neutrality laws, the legislation signed into law by outgoing Governor Jerry Brown last year is considered the nation’s toughest, and a “gold standard” for maintaining an open internet. But as AVN.com reported, California agreed to put the new law on hold until the federal court ruled on the Mozilla lawsuit.
Tuesday’s 200-page ruling, which may be read online at this link, would appear to give California the green light to put the new state-level law into effect.
“I think we have a good argument that we can now enforce this law,” said California State Senator Scott Wiener, who sponsored the state's net neutrality bill. “This is overall a bad ruling, but the silver lining is that we can act at the state level.”
The three-judge panel, composed of one Republican appointee—Stephen F. Williams, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986—and two Democratic appointees, ruled that the FCC had overstepped its authority by barring states from imposing their own net neutrality rules, while also characterizing the net neutrality advocates’ arguments for striking down the repeal “unconvincing,” according to the Washington Post.
The other two judges on the panel, both appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, were Robert Wilkins, appointed in 2014, and Patricia Millett, who was nominated by Obama in 2013.
Photo By AgnosticPreachersKid / Wikimedia Commons
