Ça ne s'arrête jamais…

The Federal Communications Commission will vote next month to start the process of reversing the commission's 2015 net neutrality order, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced in a speech today.

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Pai's net neutrality rollback targets the FCC's February 2015 reclassification of fixed and mobile Internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. Title II provides the regulatory authority the FCC used to prohibit ISPs from blocking or throttling traffic and from giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment. The FCC used Title II to impose the net neutrality rules after a previous court decision struck down rules issued without the step of reclassifying ISPs as common carriers.

The FCC vote scheduled for May 18 is on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which seeks comment on Pai's plan and could lead to a final vote later this year. Pai acknowledged that some net neutrality opponents "have called on the FCC to reverse Title II immediately through a declaratory ruling."

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The impact of Title II

Under former Chairman Tom Wheeler, a Democrat, the FCC's Title II decision had numerous other effects. Title II was used to require greater disclosures about hidden fees and data caps, but Pai's new Republican majority already exempted ISPs with 250,000 or fewer subscribers from these rules. The FCC was also trying to stop AT&T and Verizon Wireless programs that exempted their own video services from mobile data caps while charging other video providers for the same data cap exemptions until Pai ended the investigation.

Title II was also crucial in ending disputes over interconnection payments in which network operators or content providers pay ISPs for direct connections to consumer broadband networks. Before the Title II reclassification, interconnection disputes were harming the quality of video streaming and other Internet services, but those disputes were quickly resolved once the rules were in place.

More generally, Title II allows either ISPs' customers or their competitors to file complaints about "unjust" or "unreasonable" conduct. All of that will go away once ISPs are no longer classified as common carriers.