The luck of the draw means the future of network neutrality and broadband’s status as a common carrier service will be argued in San Francisco. Credit for that is split between the California Public Utilities Commission and Santa Clara County, who filed separate challenges to the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to eliminate net neutrality rules and scrap common carrier obligations for broadband service with the ninth circuit federal appeals court.
Several other organisations filed their appeals in Washington, D.C., and a federal judicial panel randomly gave the job of consolidating and deciding the cases to the San Francisco-based ninth circuit.
Both the CPUC and Santa Clara County call the FCC’s decision “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion” and claim that it violates both the federal constitution and federal communications law. In other words, they’re challenging the way the decision was made rather than its substance. That’s an easier – which is not to say easy – case to make. Republican commissioners rushed the decision through, and might not have dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s. To put it mildly, democratic commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel certainly thinks so – she called the FCC’s action a “rash decision” resulting from a “corrupt process”…
This decision and the process that brought us to this point is ugly. It’s ugly in the cavalier disregard this agency has demonstrated to the public, the contempt it has shown for citizens who speak up, and the disdain it has for popular opinion. Unlike its predecessors this FCC has not held a single public hearing on net neutrality.
There’s no shortage of Californians involved in the challenges to the FCC’s decision. California attorney general Xavier Becerra joined the appeal filed by his New York counterpart. Mozilla filed its own challenge. The Open Technology Institute and the Coalition for Internet Openness did too. Both list several Silicon Valley companies as major backers. OTI counts Google and Apple among its contributors (as well as Comcast and Charter, although I doubt this is what they signed up for).
CPUC vs. FCC, petition for review of order of agency, board, commission, or officer, 22 February 2018
County of Santa Clara vs. FCC, petition for review, 22 February 2018
Coalition for Internet Openess, petition for review, 5 March 2018
U.S. judicial panel on multidistrict litigation, in the matter of restoring internet freedom, consolidation order, 8 March 2018