With Net Neutrality Dead, Cities Sue FCC for Local Digital Rights

With federal net neutrality rules repealed for nearly 18 months now, local cities and towns are attempting build their own, locally controlled broadband networks—and the FCC is trying to stop them.  Now, according to a report by the tech site TechDirt, a broad coalition of 46 local cities, plus several counties and the state of Hawaii, have filed a lawsuit against the FCC to stop an order that restricts how much revenue they can raise from big telecom companies through franchise fees. In fact, the new FCC rule allows Comcast and other giant ISPs to pay local communities with “services like free air time instead of money,” according to a Bloomberg News report.  Local communities use that revenue to support local media services, and to expand broadband access to poorly served, mostly rural areas. But the FCC under Donald Trump-appointed Chair Ajit Pai wants the large telecom companies such as AT&T and Verizon to control the local services. Several states have already put their own net neutrality laws in place, laws that the FCC has sued to block. But in a recent ruling, a federal court said that states do, in fact, have the right to impose their own net neutrality standards.  In addition, after the FCC voted to repeal the 2015 net neutrality rules more than 100 mayors of United States cities signed the “Cities Open Internet Pledge,” in which they vowed not to grant local contracts to internet service providers who fail to follow net neutrality standards. Under net neutrality principles, ISPs may not favor internet traffic from certain sites—including sites that they, themselves, own—over others. While the FCC is attempting to stop local governments from exerting controls over the big ISPs, under its own “Restoring Internet Freedom” act, the new FCC regulation rolling back net neutrality, the regulator gave up its own right to regulate internet access providers. Instead, the net neutrality repeal assigned that responsibility to the Federal Trade Commission, which “lacks the resources or authority to police the sector and punish bad behavior,” according to tech sector journalist Karl Bode, in his new report published via Medium.com and titled, “Killing Net Neutrality Was Even Worse Than You Think.” Photo By Slowking4 / Wikimedia Commons