Now that numerous lawsuits are being filed against the net neutrality order, I thought I would give my own take on some of the issues being raised by the various lawsuits. I’m certainly no lawyer, but I have been following the FCC closely since 1980 and have seen how numerous challenges to their regulations have gone over the years. So following is my take on the major arguments being made against them.

Procedural Issues There are two procedural problems that could be troublesome for the FCC. First, the final order bears almost no resemblance to the original proposal that the Commission floated when seeking public comments. Even though it took a few hundred pages to explain it, the final net neutrality order boils down to a handful of actual new principles defining the way net neutrality is going to work.

The problem is that those few provisions include new ideas and terminology like prohibiting paid prioritization and not allowing throttling of web traffic. Those concepts were not included explicitly in the original notice. The FCC and other similar agencies have a long history of adhering to specific procedures for making new rules, and that process involves presenting the proposed ideas to the public and then soliciting comments.

I can see a valid argument that there was not adequate opportunity to discuss what was actually ordered. Of course, if that’s the only thing that the courts find wrong about the order, it’s a pretty easy fix, and at worst the FCC would have to go through another public notice and comment period.

More troubling is that at the last minute the FCC tossed in the idea of regulating Internet interconnection agreements and peering arrangements. That was a surprise to most of the industry and even made a few proponents come out against the final order. That is a major change in FCC authority and I can’t find any prior notice of the FCC’s intent to do this to the extent contained in the order.

Reversing Major Precedents Generally, agencies like the FCC must rely on the intent of Congress and existing legislation in creating their overall framework of rules. In this order the FCC reversed a lot of prior work it did on the topic of regulating the Internet. Obviously federal agencies are allowed to change their interpretation of the law, but in this case there is a mountain of prior legal opinions from FCC lawyers saying that Congress did not intend to treat the Internet as a public utility under the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

That makes it hard, under external scrutiny from courts, for the FCC to now reverse itself and say that the Internet is a utility and should be regulated as such. The net neutrality order spends a whole lot of words trying to defend its change in direction. And rightfully so, because I would guess that this is going to be at the crux of any court review of the FCC’s authority to make this new set of rules.

Use of Forbearance to Modernize Regulatory Law I thought the way that the FCC chose to implement net neutrality was clever, by bringing it under Title II rules but then forbearing against rules there that they don’t choose to apply. But that cleverness is a point of legal attack. Obviously choosing which parts of Title II to forbear was somewhat arbitrary. But worse, if forbearance is an acceptable method of regulating the Internet, there would be nothing to stop the FCC in the future from changing the list of things they are forbearing from.

Regulating the Internet is a major new undertaking, and one would normally expect an agency to publish a new coherent set of rules laying forth how they will accomplish such a new undertaking. They would publish the gist of the new rules and ask for comments. In this case, by choosing forbearance, there was no public discussion of which Title II rules should or should not apply, nor is there any particular reason to think that the forbearance choices made are permanent and cast in stone.

Applying the Rules to Small ISPs One of the lawsuits attacks the FCC for applying the network neutrality rules to all ISPs, including small ones that don’t have any market power. Certainly small ISPs, on their own, cannot undertake the large deals that would give priority to some content over others. But this doesn’t mean that small ISPs can’t be bad actors. It certainly is within the ability of small ISPs to block access to content that they find unacceptable, even if such content is lawful. Further, small ISPs often work as part of larger consortiums that might have the market power to undertake arrangements that would violate net neutrality. For example, there are several large ISP clearinghouses in the country that provide the servers, software, and ISP functions for millions of end users.

The courts have an interesting challenge with this order. To some degree, in the FCC’s defense, they undertook regulating the Internet in a manner that the last court review suggested they should consider. But the way they went about it is unorthodox, and in regulatory law that always creates a challenge.