The FCC’s Republican majority, led by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai, has been successful in laying the groundwork to broaden our economic and social inequalities in the field of communications. Greatly hampering low-income subsidized broadband programs and rolling back net neutrality consumer protections at the federal level is exactly why Pai was installed in the FCC in the first place. The unintended consequence of getting our light federal net neutrality protections rolled back is that states have decided they will have to step up and protect their citizens themselves. This in turn has led to lawsuits by big telecoms against municipalities and states, arguing that telecoms shouldn’t be regulated by states because such regulatory powers belong to the federal government—the same powers that they fought (successfully) to roll back.
A few days ago, the Ajit Pai-supported Charter Spectrum telecom was able to get a court victory against Minnesota’s state government when a court ruled that the state cannot regulate Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone services offered by Charter. VoIP is basically phone service offered over the internet. Pai released this bogus statement:
“A patchwork quilt of 50 state laws harms investment and innovation in advanced communications services. That’s why federal law for decades has recognized that states may not regulate information services. The Eighth Circuit’s decision is important for reaffirming that well-established principle: ‘[A]ny state regulation of an information service conflicts with the federal policy of nonregulation’ and is therefore preempted. That is wholly consistent with the approach the FCC has taken under Democratic and Republican Administrations over the last two decades, including in last year’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order.” [Emphasis added.]
The court ruled that VoIP services are covered as “information services,” and therefore states must defer to the federal government’s policies. Pai and his cronies rolled back very popular and clearly business-friendly net neutrality consumer protections, creating this need. He’s also lying about the ruling, according to a lawyer involved in one of the many net neutrality cases, who told Ars Technica that this case "has no bearing" on net neutrality.
The net neutrality case is being handled by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, so it will be decided by different judges. The details are also different in the net neutrality case, said attorney Andrew Schwartzman, who represents the Benton Foundation in the case against the FCC.
In the net neutrality case, "the Pai FCC definitively said that it has no jurisdiction under either Title I or Title II [of the Communications Act] to regulate broadband Internet access service," Schwartzman told Ars. "As the governmental parties explained at pp. 39-56 their brief, when an agency lacks authority to regulate, it also lacks authority to preempt."
The FCC never made a decision as to the regulatory classification of VoIPs. As a result, the court was dealing with that question first and foremost in issuing its ruling. Ajit Pai is making use of a court ruling about a case that is not the same as the net neutrality case he’s applying it to. Ajit Pai is a lawyer and should know better. So he’s either very consciously lying, or he’s a dumb lawyer. I’m willing to bet he’s a bit of category A and bit of category B.