Trump's FCC won a terrible victory in last week's net neutrality ruling, but we're still winning the war

On Oct 1, a coalition of public interest groups and states' attorneys general lost their appeal in a legal bid to block the FCC's dismantling of federal Net Neutrality protections, accomplished through a mixture of lies and fraud. It was a crushing defeat for Americans and American competitiveness and access to digital life.

But it's not all bad news. In the wake of the FCC's destruction of Net Neutrality, 34 states crafted bills protecting Net Neutrality at the state level and many of these have already passed into state law.

This prompted Republican FCC commissioners and Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to do a fast reversal: under Obama's FCC, they had argued that the FCC could not dictate telcoms policy to the states (Obama's FCC prohibited states from passing laws that limited cities' ability to create publicly owned municipal networks). The spectacle of states taking measures to regulate the carriers and cable operators who had bought and paid for the GOP Commissioners prompted those "states' rights" advocates to have a change of heart and insist that the federal government alone could dictate telcoms policies.

But in its Oct 1 ruling, the Federal Circuit appeals court told the FCC that it was wrong: where the FCC refused to regulate, states could step in to fill the void.

Now, ISPs have a choice: they can either try to geolocate their discriminatory practices so precisely that they don't inadvertently violate laws in states that have Net Neutrality statutes, or they can simply treat the whole country as though federal Net Neutrality rules were still in effect. Read the rest