Law Commons^™

Uncommon Carriage, Blake Reid

Publications

As states have begun regulating the carriage of speech by “Big Tech” internet platforms, scholars, advocates, and policymakers have increasingly focused their attention on the law of common carriage. Legislators have invoked common carriage to defend social media regulations against First Amendment challenges, making arguments set to take center stage in the Supreme Court’s impending consideration of the NetChoice saga.

This Article challenges the coherence of common carriage as a field and its utility for assessing the constitutionality and policy wisdom of internet regulation. Evaluating the post-Civil War history of common carriage regimes in telecommunications law, this Article illustrates that …

Symmetry And (Network) Neutrality, Tejas N. Narechania

Michigan Law Review Online

In this short Essay, I take the opportunity to highlight one further potential asymmetry that may yet emerge from the Supreme Court’s application of Chevron’s many doctrines. Drawing on then-Judge Kavanaugh’s disdissental from the D.C. Circuit’s decision affirming network neutrality rules, I suggest that there is at least one vote on the Supreme Court—and perhaps more—for an asymmetric approach to the major questions doctrine. Moreover, I demonstrate how asymmetry in this context is deeply irrational. As applied to network neutrality, the asymmetry has at least one of two effects. One, it might simply favor one large industry over another, …

Common Carriage’S Domain, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The judicial decision invalidating the Federal Communications Commission's first Open Internet Order has led advocates to embrace common carriage as the legal basis for network neutrality. In so doing, network neutrality proponents have overlooked the academic literature on common carriage as well as lessons from its implementation history. This Essay distills these learnings into five factors that play a key role in promoting common carriage's success: (1) commodity products, (2) simple interfaces, (3) stability and uniformity in the transmission technology, (4) full deployment of the transmission network, and (5) stable demand and market shares. Applying this framework to the Internet …

Beyond Neutrality: How Zero Rating Can (Sometimes) Advance User Choice, Innovation, And Democratic Participation, Bj Ard

Maryland Law Review

Over four billion people across the globe cannot afford Internet access. Their economic disadvantages are compounded by their inability to utilize the communicative, educational, and commercial tools that most Internet users take for granted. Enter zero rating. Mobile Internet providers in the developing world now waive the data charges for services like Facebook, Wikipedia, or local job-search sites. Despite zero rating’s apparent benefits, many advocates seek to ban the practice as a violation of net neutrality.

This Article argues that zero rating is defensible by net neutrality’s own normative lights. Network neutrality is not about neutrality for its own sake, …

Déjà Vu All Over Again: Questions And A Few Suggestions On How The Fcc Can Lawfully Regulate Internet Access, Rob Frieden

Rob Frieden

This paper will examine the FCC’s March, 2015 Open Internet Order with an eye to assessing whether and how the Commission can successfully defend its decision in an appellate court. On two prior occasions, the FCC failed to convince a reviewing court that proposed regulatory safeguards do not unlawfully impose common carrier duties on private carriers. The Commission now has opted to reclassify broadband Internet access as common carriage, a decision sure to trigger a third court appeal. The FCC Open Internet Order offers several, possibly contradictory, justifications for its decision to apply Title II of the Communications Act, subject …

Network Neutrality And Consumer Demand For “Better Than Best Efforts” Traffic Management, Rob Frieden

Rob Frieden

This paper assesses whether and how ISPs can offer quality of service enhancements, at premium prices for full motion video, while still complying with the new rules and regulations established by the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) in March, 2015. The paper explains that having made the controversial decision to reclassify all forms of Internet access as a telecommunications service, the FCC increases regulatory uncertainty. In particular, the FCC has failed to identify instances where “retail ISPs,” serving residential broadband subscribers, can offer quality of service enhancements that serve real consumer wants without harming competition and the ability of most content …

Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Approaches To Network Neutrality: A Cost Benefit Analysis, Rob Frieden

Rob Frieden

Many advocates for less intrusive government oversight of telecommunications support the migration from regulation by an expert agency to the use of adjudication remedies largely guided by antitrust/competition policy principles. They believe that competition authorities, or reviewing courts can resolve disputes after they have occurred in lieu of having expert regulatory agencies available to anticipate and resolve problems before they become acute. Such ex post remedies typically determine whether anticompetitive conduct has occurred and what marketplace harm has resulted. Advocates for retaining so-called ex ante regulation believe that an expert agency remains essential particularly in light of fast changing market …

What’S New In The Network Neutrality Debate, Rob Frieden

Rob Frieden

For over ten years, academics, practitioners, policy makers, consumers and other stakeholders have debated whether and how governments should regulate the Internet with an eye toward promoting accessibility, affordability and neutrality. This issue has triggered grave concerns about the Internet’s ability to continue generating substantial and widespread benefits. Advocates for various outcomes have vastly different assessments about many baseline subjects including the viability of sustainable competition and self-regulation. Consumers become agitated and confused by different framing of the issues, particularly when participants in the Internet ecosystem cannot reach closure on interconnection and compensation issues. Increasingly these disputes trigger temporary degradation …

Internet Protocol Television And The Challenge Of “Mission Critical” Bits, Rob Frieden

Rob Frieden

The Internet increasingly provides an alternative distribution medium for video and other types of high value, bandwidth intensive content. Many consumers have become “technology agnostic” about what kind of wireline or wireless medium provides service. However, they expect carriers to offer access anytime, anywhere, via any device and in any format. These early adopters of new technologies and alternatives to “legacy” media have no patience with the concept of “appointment television” that limits access to a specific time, on a single channel and in only one presentation format. This paper assesses whether and how Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) can offer …

The Costs And Benefits Of Regulatory Intervention In Internet Service Provider Interconnection Disputes: Lessons From Broadcaster-Cable Retransmission Consent Negotiations, Rob Frieden

Rob Frieden

This paper considers what limited roles the FCC may lawfully assume to ensure timely and fair interconnection and compensation agreements in the Internet ecosystem. The paper examines the FCC’s limited role in broadcaster-cable television retransmission consent negotiations with an eye toward assessing the applicability of this model. The FCC explicitly states that it lacks jurisdiction to prescribe terms, or to mandate binding arbitration. However, it recently interpreted its statutory authority to ensure “good faith” negotiations as allowing it to constrain broadcaster negotiating leverage by prohibiting multiple operators, having the largest market share, from joining in collective negotiations with cable operators. …

Internet Protocol Television And The Challenge Of “Mission Critical” Bits., Rob Frieden

Rob Frieden

The Internet increasingly provides an alternative distribution medium for video and other types of high value, bandwidth intensive content. Many consumers have become “technology agnostic” about what kind of wireline or wireless medium provides service. However, they expect carriers to offer access anytime, anywhere, via any device and in any format. These early adopters of new technologies and alternatives to “legacy” media have no patience with the concept of “appointment television” that limits access to a specific time, on a single channel and in only one presentation format. This paper assesses whether and how Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) can offer …

Federal And State Authority For Network Neutrality And Broadband Regulation, Tejas N. Narechania

Tejas N. Narechania

For the second time in less than four years, the D.C. Circuit has rebuffed the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt at imposing network neutrality rules on internet traffic. But in so doing, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the FCC’s theory of jurisdiction based on section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This ruling has the significant effect of transforming a questionable source of authority into what may become the Commission’s most significant font of regulatory power.

Surprisingly, section 706 seems to give the Commission the power to implement a slightly revised set of network neutrality rules. By narrowing the scope of …

Sender Side Transmission Rules For The Internet, Tejas N. Narechania, Tim Wu

Tejas N. Narechania

It's A Series Of Tubes: Network Neutrality In The United States And How The Current Economic Environment Presents A Unique Opportunity To Invest In The Future Of The Internet , Andrew Seitz

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

It is almost an accident that the Internet developed the way it did. In the late 1990's large internet service providers (ISPs), such as AOL, that had their own proprietary networks failed to fully realize that their business model was becoming obsolete, and instead the Internet developed into the open network that it is today. But is an open network the best model for the Internet? Could more of a free market deliver a better product to the consumer? Broadband providers such as AT&T and Verizon believe that in order to give their customers the best product, they should be …

Net Neutrality: Preparing For The Future, Jennifer Wong

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Cybertravel: Legal Implications Of The Evasion Of Geolocation, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

Although the Internet is valued by many of its supporters particularly because it both defies and defeats physical borders, these important attributes are now being exposed to attempts by both governments and private entities to impose territorial limits through blocking or permitting access to content by Internet users based on their geographical location—a territorial partitioning of the Internet. One of these attempts, for example, is the recent Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) proposal in the United States. This article, as opposed to earlier literature on the topic discussing the possible virtues and methods of erecting borders in cyberspace, focuses on …

Network Neutrality: Verizon V. Fcc, Anna S. Han

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) is once again locking horns with the broadband behemoth, Verizon, over the issue of network neutrality. Although this conflict between the government and corporate giants is far from new, recent events have forced courts to give it close scrutiny. Given the explosive pace at which technology has expanded and permeated citizens’ daily lives, the judgments rendered have greater significance now than ever before.

Novel Neutrality Claims Against Internet Platforms: A Reasonable Framework For Initial Scrutiny , Jeffrey Jarosch

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article examines a recent trend in which the Federal Trade Commission and other enforcement agencies investigate Internet platforms for behavior that is insufficiently “neutral” towards users or third parties that interact with the platform. For example, Google faces a formal FTC investigation based on allegations that it has tinkered with search results rather than presenting users with a “neutral” result. Twitter faces a formal investigation after the social media service restricted the ways in which third party developers could interact with Twitter through its application programming interface (“API”). These investigations represent a new attempt to shift the network neutrality …

Network Neutrality Or Internet Innovation?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades, the Internet has undergone an extensive re-ordering of its topology that has resulted in increased variation in the price and quality of its services. Innovations such as private peering, multihoming, secondary peering, server farms, and content delivery networks have caused the Internet’s traditionally hierarchical architecture to be replaced by one that is more heterogeneous. Relatedly, network providers have begun to employ an increasingly varied array of business arrangements and pricing. This variation has been interpreted by some as network providers attempting to promote their self interest at the expense of the public. In fact, these …

Invoking And Avoiding The First Amendment: How Internet Service Providers Leverage Their Status As Both Content Creators And Neutral Conduits, Rob M. Frieden

Rob Frieden

Much of the policy debate and scholarly literature on network neutrality has addressed whether the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has statutory authority to require Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) to operate in a nondiscriminatory manner. Such analysis largely focuses on questions about jurisdiction, the scope of lawful regulation, and the balance of power between stakeholders, generally adverse to government oversight, and government agencies, apparently willing to overcome the same inclination. The public policy debate primarily considers micro-level issues, without much consideration of broader concerns such as First Amendment values. While professing to support marketplace resource allocation and a regulation-free Internet, the …

The Future Of Internet Regulation, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

Policymakers are at a precipice with regard to Internet regulation. The Federal Communications Commission's ("FCC") self-styled adjudication of a complaint that Comcast violated the agency's Internet policy principles (requiring reasonable network management, among other things) clarified that the era of the non-regulation of the Internet is over. Equally clear is that the agency has yet to develop a model of regulation for a new era. As explained in this Article, the old models of regulation - reliance on command-and-control regulation or market forces subject only to antitrust law - are doomed to fail in a dynamic environment where cooperation is …

The Next Frontier For Network Neutrality, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

The challenge for policymakers evaluating calls to institute some form of network neutrality regulation is to bring reasoned analysis to bear on a topic that continues to generate more heat than light and that many telecommunications companies appear to believe will just fade away. Over the fall of 2007, the hopes of broadband providers that broadband networks could escape any form of regulatory oversight were dealt a blow when it was revealed that Comcast had degraded the experience of some users of Bittorent (a peer-to-peer application) and engaged in an undisclosed form of network management. This incident, as well as …

Network Neutrality: Justifiable Discrimination, Unjustifiable Discrimination, And The Bright Line Between Them, Noel Semple

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This paper proposes a bright line test to guide the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (‘‘CRTC’’) in regulating ‘‘network neutrality’’. When Internet service providers seek to discriminate between uses and users in administering their networks, the CRTC should ask whether the proposed discrimination is a reasonable effort to make the price paid by each user commensurate to the demands which his or her use places on the network. Discrimination which meets this description should be tolerated if not actively encouraged, because it encourages the economically efficient allocation of scarce bandwidth. All other forms of ISP discrimination — including discrimination based …

Internet 3.0: Identifying Problems And Solutions To The Network Neutrality Debate , Robert M. Frieden

ExpressO

What Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) can and cannot do to diversify services lies at the core of the debate over network neutrality. In prior generations ISPs had little incentive or technological capability to deviate from plain vanilla best efforts routing for content providers and from standard “all you can eat” subscription terms for consumer access to the World Wide Web. The next generation Internet has the technological capability and ISPs have the commercial motivation to offer “better than best efforts” routing and premium services for both content providers and consumers seeking higher quality of service and more reliable traffic delivery. …

Justice, And Only Justice, You Shall Pursue: Network Neutrality, The First Amendment And John Rawls's Theory Of Justice, Amit M. Schejter, Moran Yemini

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

As broadband becomes the public's technology of choice to access the Internet, it is also emerging as the battlefield upon which the struggle for control of the Internet is being fought. Operators who provide physical access to the service claim the right to discriminate among the content providers who use the infrastructure in which the operators have invested. In contrast, content providers warn that exercising such a policy would "undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success."[...] For academic observers, analysis of this issue has thus far been confined to the areas of property law, innovation, and …

Network Neutrality: Justifiable Discrimination, Unjustifiable Discrimination, And The Bright Line Between Them, Noel Semple

Law Publications

This paper proposes a bright line test to guide the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (‘‘CRTC’’) in regulating ‘‘network neutrality’’. When Internet service providers seek to discriminate between uses and users in administering their networks, the CRTC should ask whether the proposed discrimination is a reasonable effort to make the price paid by each user commensurate to the demands which his or her use places on the network. Discrimination which meets this description should be tolerated if not actively encouraged, because it encourages the economically efficient allocation of scarce bandwidth. All other forms of ISP discrimination— including discrimination based on …

Keeping The Internet Neutral?: Tim Wu And Christopher Yoo Debate, Tim Wu, Christopher S. Yoo

Faculty Scholarship

"Net neutrality" has been among the leading issues of telecommunications policy this decade. Is the neutrality of the Internet fundamental to its success, and worth regulating to protect, or simply a technical design subject to improvement? In this debate-form commentary, Tim Wu and Christopher Yoo make clear the connection between net neutrality and broader issues of national telecommunications policy.

Wireless Carterfone, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Over the next decade, regulators will spend increasing time on conflicts between the private interests of the wireless industry and the public’s interest in the best uses of its spectrum. This report examines the practices of the wireless industry with an eye toward understanding their influence on innovation and consumer welfare.

In many respects, the mobile wireless market is and remains a wonder. Thanks to both policy and technological innovations, devices that were science fiction 30 years ago are now widely available. Over the last decade, wireless mobile has been an “infant industry,” attempting to achieve economies of scale. That …

Network Neutrality Or Bias?--Handicapping The Odds For A Tiered And Branded Internet, Robert M. Frieden

ExpressO

Recent double digit billion dollar mergers of telecommunications firms consolidate both market share and market leadership by incumbent operators such as Verizon. These companies seek to exploit technological and market convergence by offering a triple play package of wired and wireless telephone service, video and Internet access. As well they need to develop new profit centers to compensate for declining revenues and market shares in traditional services such as wireline telephony.

While incumbent telecommunications operators have pursued new market opportunities, these ventures have not abandoned core management philosophies, operating assumptions and business strategies. Longstanding strategies for recovering investments, using a …

Opening Bottlenecks: On Behalf Of Mandated Network Neutrality, Bill D. Herman

ExpressO

This paper calls for mandated “network neutrality,” the principle that broadband service providers (BSPs) should generally treat all nondestructive data equally. Without such a mandate, BSPs will likely begin charging content providers for the right to send data at the fastest speeds available. The present frequency with which BSPs block some data entirely will also likely increase.

Neutral networks are preferable for two key reasons. First, they spawn innovation, as illustrated by the explosive online innovation to date. Second, neutral networks better distribute communication power, promoting First Amendment values. Extant and likely future acts of discrimination erode both goals. The …