Law Commons^™

Internet Governance And Democratic Legitimacy, Oliver Sylvain

Federal Communications Law Journal

Even as the Internet goes pop, federal policymakers continue to surrender their statutory obligation to regulate communications in the first instance to extralegal nongovernmental organizations comprised of technical experts. The FCC's adjudication of a dispute concerning a major broadband service provider's network management practices is a case in point. There, in the absence of any enforceable legislative or regulatory rule, the FCC turned principally to the transmission principles of the Internet Engineering Taskforce, the preeminent nongovernmental Internet engineering standard-setting organization. This impulse to defer as a matter of course to such an organization without any legal mechanism requiring as much …