Law Commons^™

Derailed By The D.C. Circuit: Getting Network Management Regulation Back On Track, Edward B. Mulligan V

Federal Communications Law Journal

As the Internet continues to play a more central role in the daily lives of Americans, concerns about how Internet service providers manage their networks have arisen. Responding to these concerns and recognizing the importance of maintaining the open and competitive nature of the Internet, the FCC has taken incremental steps to regulate network management practices. Perhaps the most significant of these steps was its August 2008 Memorandum Decision and Order in which the FCC condemned Comcast Corporation's network management practices as "discriminatory and arbitrary." In that Order, the FCC required that Comcast (1) adopt new practices that complied with …

Creating Effective Broadband Network Regulation, Daniel L. Brenner

Federal Communications Law Journal

The Internet is central to the business and pastimes of Americans. Calls for increased regulation are ongoing, inevitable, and often justified. But calls for "network neutrality" or "nondiscrimination" assume with little hesitation federal agency competence to give predictable and accurate meaning to these terms and create regulations to implement them. This Article's chief contribution to Internet policy debate is to focus attention on the likelihood of successful FCC Internet regulation-a key assumption of some advocates.

The Article analyzes three characteristics that hobble the FCC, which is the likeliest federal agency to provide prescriptive rules. First, the record for the agency …