D.C. Memo: TechFreedom Mocks FCC's Net Neutrality Rules As 'Agency Self-Aggrandizement'
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Amicus: TechFreedom, along with the Washington Legal Foundation, filed an amicus brief yesterday that called on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to toss out the FCC's Net Neutrality rules. The court stayed the rules on Aug. 1. In the brief, the think tanks mocked the FCC's effort to use Title II in the Communications Act to impose common carrier regulation on broadband ISPs in defiance of new Supreme Court restraints on the administrative state. "It’s astonishing that the FCC is once again seeking to impose heavy-handed regulation on Internet access," the brief said. "The revival of the Title II debate at the FCC is policymaking as backward-looking political grudge match, bureaucratic make-work and agency self-aggrandizement, and state control as an end in itself. It’s broken government in action," said the brief signed by TechFreedom’s Corbin Barthold, Berin Szóka, and James Dunstan. The FCC's rules were legally deficient, the brief added, because they violated the Supreme Court's Major Questions Doctrine, which bans the FCC from resolving legal questions of vast economic and political significance without clear congressional authorization. "The FCC is seeking to answer a major policy question — it lacks clear authority to do so," the brief said. "Not only is [Net Neutrality] politically significant; it is the latest entry in one of the most politically significant debates in the history of administrative law."
