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 …

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 …

Regulatory Challenges And Models Of Regulation, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.