California Agency Asks Court To Toss FCC’s Net Neutrality Repeal

LOS ANGELES—Last week, with less than a week to go before Donald Trump’s appointed Federal Communications Commission Chair Ajit Pai is set to resign — and Trump’s presidency will end with the inauguration of Joe Biden — the California Public Utilities Commission petitioned a federal court to overturn the FCC’s 2017 vote to end federal net neutrality rules. Ending net neutrality was one of Pai’s top priorities when the former telecom industry lawyer became FCC chair. In December, 2017, the five-member board — then composed of three Republicans and two Democrats — voted 3-2 along party lines to repeal the Obama-era net neutrality rules. The repeal took effect about six months later, in June of 2018, in a development that appeared especially ominous for the adult industry. Net neutrality rules guarantee that all online data traffic must be treated equally, without slowing or blocking. With adult content especially susceptible to censorship, the rules ensure that adult sites have the same access to data pipes as any other data source. In October of 2019, the United States District of Columbia District Court upheld the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules, turning away a lawsuit brought by the Mozilla Foundation — makers of the open-source web browser Firefox — and other groups. But in a filing last week, according to a Reuters report, the California PUC asked the court to reconsider its earlier decision and dump the net neutrality repeal after all. The PUC called the FCC’s 2017 vote, “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion.” Pai, whose term extends to June but who has announced his plans to step down on January 20, the same day Biden will be inaugurated, did not comment to Reuters on the California petition. Within weeks of the federal repeal in 2018, California passed its own net neutrality law. But the federal Department of Justice immediately filed a lawsuit against California to block the law. Even  when the D.C. District Court  ruled in its October decision that states had the right to create their own net neutrality rules, the government continued its lawsuit.  But last week, 13 Democratic members of California’s congressional delegation sent a letter to Biden’s attorney general nominee, Merrick Garland, asking him to drop the lawsuit immediately after Biden’s inauguration. Photo By Daniel Dino-Slofer / Pixabay