Democrat-Led FCC Announces Plan to Revive Obama-Era Net Neutrality Rules

The Democrat-led majority at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced on Tuesday it hopes to revive the Obama-era net neutrality regulations.

Democrats at the FCC, having finally achieved a partisan majority at the commission, moved to revive the net neutrality rules. The regulations were in place for one year under then-President Barack Obama before being undone by the then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai under President Donald Trump’s administration.

The issue of net neutrality has been a longstanding goal of leftists who hope to gain greater regulatory authority over the internet by using Title II regulations.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said that the net neutrality regulations will seek to keep the internet “open and fair” despite Title II regulations would lead to greater regulation of the internet landscape.

Essentially, net neutrality regulations seek to block internet service providers (ISPs) such as Comcast or Verizon from blocking, slowing down, and allowing for “paid prioritization,” by which users can pay for faster, more consistent service.

Breitbart News’s Allum Bokhari further explained:

The law of common carriage, mandated by the Title II regulations demanded by Democrats, is one of the solutions recommended by Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas to address tech censorship. Yet Democrats want the rule applied to service providers, which are not in the habit of kicking off internet users for their political viewpoints, while not recommending similar regulations on the companies and platforms that are actually responsible for suppressing online discourse over the past five years — companies like Google, YouTube, Twitter/X, and Facebook.

Progressives and Democrats lost their minds when the FCC repealed Net Neutrality under Trump, predicting the end of the internet as we know it, and a variety of other disasters. As Breitbart News predicted at the time, none of these doom-laden predictions came true,  and in fact broadband speeds across the country improved.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr stated on the day of Rosenworcel’s announcement, saying that Obama’s lawyers agreed that pursuing Title II regulation of the internet would “be struck down” and “would be a serious mistake.”

Carr, citing the Obama lawyers, also contended that these regulations would give the FCC-wide regulatory authority over the internet:

First, the two senior Obama Administration alums are correct that, in their words, an FCC decision
“classifying broadband internet access service as Title II telecommunications service would ‘bring about
an enormous and transformative expansion in [the agency’s] regulatory authority . . . over the national
economy.’”
Continuing, they rightly state that regulating the Internet as a Title II utility service “would
vastly expand the Commission’s authority and would transform the way a federal agency regulates a
vitally important element of our economy and the personal and social lives of hundreds of millions of
Americans.”

“Heading down the path to Title II would not only push vital FCC matters onto the back burner, it would knock many of them off the stove altogether,” Carr added.

The debate over net neutrality also raises the question over who is more to blame for the throttling, blocking, and censorship of content on the internet.

Pai has long claimed when defending his “Restoring Internet Freedom Order,” which repealed net neutrality, that edge providers, or social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter/X, have been largely responsible for censoring content.

Indeed, even the Washington Post recently alleged that X throttled traffic to websites X/Twitter owner Elon Musk reportedly dislikes such as Facebook, Instagram, Threats, the Twitter-like service created by Facebook parent company Meta, Meta, and Substack.

Twenty-seven Senate Democrats wrote to the FCC, urging them to reinstate net neutrality regulations.