The Obamanet Overreach

[Commentary] For the first 20 years of the Internet, entrepreneurs were free to focus on their computer code that changed everyone’s life. Now regulators are forcing technologists to cope with a different kind of code -- the legal system. Unlike the disciplined operation of digital software, the legal code depends on human willingness to obey its rules.

In Dec, the federal appeals court in Washington heard make-or-break arguments against new regulations micromanaging the Internet. The rules issued earlier in 2015 for the first time gave bureaucrats power to block new Internet products, services, pricing and technologies. These regulations violate the bipartisan congressional consensus retained since the Clinton administration to keep the Internet free of regulation. Ever since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, congressional policy has been to “preserve the vibrant and competitive free market” for the Internet “unfettered by federal or state regulation.” Federal judges are now deciding what to do about the Obama Administration’s scheme to get around Congress by pressuring the supposedly independent Federal Communications Commission to fetter the Internet through regulations designed more than a century ago for railroads and the telephone monopoly. Judges are hard to predict, so there is no guarantee that the appeals court, when it rules, will have the courage of Federal Judge David Tatel's conviction that agencies must operate independently. But by overturning the Obamanet regulations, judges would protect both the law and the Internet.