As predicted, it’s beginning. “It” is the regulatory dismantling that became inevitable when our rogue Supreme Court overruled “Chevron deference” and held that judges, rather than subject-matter experts, should decide regulatory policies.
A court has now struck down Net Neutrality.
If you are unfamiliar with this policy, or unsure why it matters, Vox had a comprehensive explanation back in 2016, when the Trump administration attacked it. Basically, Net Neutrality prohibits Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from discriminating among users.
Trump’s prior assault on Internet equality was just one of his efforts to make America “great” for the powerful and wealthy. Now, Trump’s remade Court has super-charged the fight against the government’s ability to impose fair “rules of the road.”
As the New York Times reported,
A federal appeals court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality rules on Thursday, ending a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband internet providers as utilities.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said the F.C.C. lacked the authority to reinstate rules that prevented broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to internet content. In its opinion, a three-judge panel pointed to a Supreme Court decision in June, known as Loper Bright, that overturned a 1984 legal precedent that gave deference to government agencies on regulations….
The F.C.C. had voted in April to restore net neutrality regulations, which expand government oversight of broadband providers and aim to protect consumer access to the internet. The regulations were first put in place nearly a decade ago under the Obama administration and were aimed at preventing internet service providers like Verizon or Comcast from blocking or degrading the delivery of services from competitors like Netflix and YouTube. The rules were repealed under President-elect Donald J. Trump in his first administration.
I have previously explained why the Loper Bright decision was so wrongheaded–and another stunning departure from longstanding precedent.
Robert Hubbell has addressed the ruling with his usual common sense explanation.
One of the major controversies of the Court’s 2024 term was the termination of the Chevron doctrine that afforded deference to federal experts charged with rulemaking pursuant to congressional regulation. The reactionary majority on the Supreme Court concluded that federal judges—with crushing caseloads—are better equipped to make discretionary policy judgments about rules authorized by Congress to regulate industries as varied and complex as nuclear energy, general aviation, drug testing, coal mine safety, and deep-water oil drilling. See Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo,
In short, the Roberts’ Court substituted itself for tens of thousands of subject-matter experts with hundreds of thousands of years of experience regulating complex industries.
The first significant casualty of the Court’s hubris in Loper Bright was the “net neutrality” doctrine. A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit overruled the FCC’s interpretation of whether broadband internet service is “an information service” or a “telecommunications service for purposes of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.”
Hubbell goes on to quote Chris Geidner’s Substack.
In the relatively brief, 26-page decision, [Judge] Griffin declared that three judges sitting on an appeals court representing four states in the middle of the country were better suited to decide what a law in place since the mid-1990s means than the experts or political appointees at the FCC.
Instead of the executive branch issuing its interpretation, subject to electoral constraints and judicial review (and with the benefit of those subject experts on the agency’s staff), a man who has been a judge since the 1980s wrote the Sixth Circuit’s opinion deciding the matter on Thursday . . . .
Welcome to the brave new world of federal judges overruling experts charged with rulemaking by Congress.
As I have previously explained, Chevron deference was a well-considered judicial doctrine that had been applied for 40 years in over 18,000 decisions. It applied to the multiple situations in which Congress sends “ambiguous” directions to executive agencies staffed with people who are experts in the particular area. That ambiguity is intentional and necessary; Congress isn’t equipped to determine the proper levels of contaminants in water or to identify carcinogenic chemicals–and even if such specifics were part of the legislation, they would be incredibly difficult to monitor and/or update as technical knowledge advances.
Under Chevron, technocrats didn’t have the last word–if a plaintiff could show that a regulation was unreasonable, courts could and did overrule it. The rule simply recognized the complexity of the world we inhabit–and the importance of specialized expertise–an importance this arrogant Court dismisses.
As Tom Nichols has amply documented, in the age of MAGA, education, knowledge and expertise have become unacceptably “woke”–and certainly not entitled to respect.
I have not taken the time to study SCOTUS’s long-term successes and failures. Still, as an interested observer now, it’s clear that these nine justices’ judgments, based on their collective mental process, do not favor maintaining liberal democracy.
We have been living in a house of cards.
I’m sure few agree with me, but applying AI to their job, trained with all that is known and cataloged on the Internet, is probably possible now and more likely to yield long-term success.
The knowledge tools that have emerged during my lifetime are the problem and solution. What’s clear is that nine humans who rarely agree on anything is no longer the answer and will be fatal to the survival of the US as a prosperous country.
It’s impossible to imagine how the most powerful country in the world will end up and what that will do to the stability of our species and the world.
As it pertains to safety in the workplace or the First Amendment, the Roberts court is an utter disaster and will have blood on its hands when people start to die because of their virulent passion to deregulate.
Pete’s right. These ideologues are dismantling decades of legal precedents that BENEFIT ALL THE PEOPLE, not just the rich. Marx was right too, and here’s yet another example of why.
“…in the age of MAGA, education, knowledge and expertise have become unacceptably “woke”–and certainly not entitled to respect.”
There have been many other times in history when a country or a government, lead by an ideology of one kind or another, has considered education and expertise as suspect. Russia under Stalin, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot. It did not work out well for them. I wonder how it will work out for us?
I guess we no longer need the Federal Register. Will the Justices publish proposed regulations? Will they review the comments and adjust the proposed regs when they get a comment that makes sense or seems wildly unpopular?
Since the courts seem to be in the control of the oligarchs, there won’t be any need to hire lawyers to provide the comments that the (formerly) regulated corporations have sent en mass. (Savings on personnel really can add to bottom line.) The thinking was that hundreds of screeds against a new reg beat the few scattered comments that favor it. If you ever wondered why a law didn’t do what you thought it would, now you know.
As a former network engineer, if you don’t think net neutrality is a big deal you have no idea how bad it could be. Many years ago I was setting up a doctor’s office with internet connectivity to the hospital and installed a VPN device. The traffic was just green screen type of data so it was a very minimal amount of traffic. The local cable provider had decided that people using VPNs were eating up too much of their traffic bandwidth and decided to block VPNs. About every 15 minutes, the doctors office application would quit working and it would take 20 or 30 seconds for the VPN to reestablish, basically making the Internet connection unusable. Now imagine an Internet provider deciding Netflix wasn’t priority traffic and every couple minutes your streaming data started to buffer and the little wait symbol spun. The solution in the case of the doctor’s office was to spend twice as much on a “business class” internet connection from the same provider and still only using a trickle of data. The cost of your Internet connection is going to go from $49 a month and if you wanna connect to Prime Video that’ll be something like an extra $9.99 a month. Basically you can expect the price of your Internet connectivity to skyrocket as providers figure out how they can hold you hostage. As upstream providers figure out how to leverage this, they will charge downstream providers more, so your bill will go up if you want reliable connectivity. That’s what not having net neutrality looks like.
@Pete
It seems unfair to refer to the repeatedly rogue decisions of the Robert’s Court as the failings of all nine justices. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson have repeatedly disavowed themselves of these decisions, including in the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo case overruling Chevron.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/22-451
I do hope that they continue to show up and speak truth to those in power.
Pete called our country a “house of cards.” That is very accurate, but more so for the capitalist and free market economic systems.
Why didn’t Biden or even Obama codify net neutrality through Congress? Why did they leave it up to the FCC, knowing a Republican FCC Chairman would reverse it, as Trump did within a few months?
Oh yeah, telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon donated large chunks of their money to the Democratic Party and then in second place they gave to the Republican Party. According to Open Secrets, “84 out of 111 Verizon Communications lobbyists in 2024 have previously held government jobs.”
Indiana has many ISP choices, but the Top 3 rule the roost and basically have monopolies within the industry. Internet neutrality will be returned to the individual states and markets where bigger is always better. Why do consumers need protection from monopolies? LOL
And speaking of utilities, has anybody in Indiana witnessed an astronomical increase in their electrical bills? Over in East Central Indiana, we’re seeing 6-800% increases in pricing many residents out of their homes/apartments. What happened in 2025 that allowed such a substantial increase? I thought we had a regulatory commission to prevent these drastic increases.
Get out the popcorn, boys and girls, the party has begun!
Todd, you’re “saving” the planet, remember???? Getting rid of coal is
EXPENSIVE! You can’t have it both ways 🤣
Becky, do you think supplementing coal with free energy from the sun and wind is raising electric bills?
Do you know how much we subsidize the coal and coal-powered plants based on the damage they cause to the environment and people?
It breaks down to $11 million a minute or $5.9 trillion annually. And that was five years ago so it’s even worse now. It’s NOT a cheap energy source and never has been.
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trillion-in-subsidies-in-2020-report-finds
Now I know why you’re a MAGA supporter (eye-roll).
seems were being used as pawns again. the idea was a free inetrnet,now it will cost you like gasoline to be postured to a nets policy(you cant live without us). like X anyone. seems musk want to sue the media over writing about his wreck being blown up next to trump vegas front doors. hes covering his ass,but maybe wont admit its a musk/trump protests. so use the net to change the subject. its been this way since its inception. he has his own built in pecker now. con-gress doesnt seem to care about any privacy issue compared to the euro standards. as long a googlesque billion$ it shareholders annually,who cares. con-gress wont write laws for free speach, the right to vote or the right to live like a human anymore. were wired for our personals to be exploited by any enity we come in contact with. come now the internets providers to do as they please. better read the fine line like that app you signed off on preventing any retaliation on any enity that corp owns. were all in the same game. weve allowed it to become this way. everyday life is controled and manipulated to provide for some enity that sucks the life outta your pocket. the court has approved,now submit..
Todd;
im looking at the minnkota power plant from my front door. here in NoDak. better hope they keep on providing,FPL florida power and light buys the wattage..
My utility bills are getting higher with every rate increase approved by the IURC. Together those bills are about equal to what I pay for electronics. Everything is monetized to control and exclude.
Instead of reducing costs, wind and solar are being used to enhance profits as fossil fuel corporations pass the costs of cleaning up after decades of pollution on to the consumer, charging customers who send free power back to them for using the corporation’s infrastructure to do so.
Remember when utilities where “public”? AES and CEG in central Indiana are profiteers first and public service providers last. They are monopolies created by the GOP policies sold as public/private combined are more cost effective and efficient than publicly owned utilities were. Guess who profits? And it isn’t the end users.
There are a number of internet providers in Marion County; Comcast, ATT, T-Mobile, Spectrum, Verizon, ……… Interesting that the County limits me to Comcast and ATT at my home address. Why?
Thanks, Shelia, for this post
have to go look something old up, before I can even voice a thought.
Just put the solar panels on your house, connect to your battery system, connect to your house – and presto – You’re off the grid !!! Free energy – see how easy it is.
So nice to see someone (Hubbell) using the correct term, “reactionary”. We have spent too many decades normalizing the right by calling them “conservative”. There has never been such restraint on calling someone on the left “radical”. Old PoliSci definitions, from left to right (radical, liberal, moderate, conservative, reactionary).
CGH – it is no secret that carriers have divvied up the territory.
Amazing – the US invented the Internet because, unlike in Europe, the government created it and the Internet protocol is not proprietary. Then, in our “wisdom”, we left it to the big corporations to exploit, without much regulation, and the people got screwed. Thanks to the Supremes, it will just get worse.
The first two paragraphs seemed contradictory. Also, Congress is equipped to rule or make decisions? Therefore trust a central government bureaucracy?
In following the constitution we have free speech and we elect a Congress to have the continued rlue given by the people.