The following article from today's Wall Street Journal outlines the FCC's updated net neutrality plan.

It explicitly lets cable companies shake down websites with paid fastlanes. Despite millions of public comments, the FCC is choosing to completely abandon net neutrality.

Even worse, legal experts say this proposal is built to fail, and would lose in court. Given FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's close ties with the cable industry, we can only assume that this proposal is defective by design, and intended to appease the Cable industry while fooling the public.

EMERGENCY RESPONSE NEEDED:

Original link: http://online.wsj.com/articles/fcc-net-neutrality-plan-calls-for-more-power-over-broadband-1414712501

FCC ‘Net Neutrality’ Plan Calls for More Power Over Broadband Chairman Tom Wheeler Considers Hybrid Approach to Internet Access

WASHINGTON—The head of the Federal Communications Commission is laying the groundwork for expanding the agency’s authority over broadband service, people familiar with his thinking say, a move long sought by advocates of stricter regulation of Internet-service providers. But the plan by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler isn’t expected to satisfy all proponents of “net neutrality”—the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally—because it would still allow broadband providers to cut deals with content companies for special access to customers.

The people familiar with the plan emphasized that nothing is final, noting that any proposal would require a vote of the full five-member commission, which is made up of three Democrats and two Republicans. And whatever approach the FCC tries almost certainly will be met with a legal challenge from broadband providers, who would resist giving the agency a heavier hand. Mr. Wheeler has said an open Internet is a goal in developing the rules, along with barring providers from slowing down or blocking content to consumers. Reclassifying broadband to expand the FCC’s authority without explicitly banning broadband providers’ deals would allow the agency to keep such authority in its back pocket to block any arrangements that it views as anticompetitive. He also wants to ensure that the FCC’s final rules, which are expected by year-end, can hold up in court. Advocates of net neutrality say that the only way to achieve it is to classify the Internet as common carrier, or a public utility. The broadband providers would like the FCC to keep them classified as information services, which makes the industry subject to far less regulation.

Caught in the middle, Mr. Wheeler is close to settling on a hybrid approach, people close to the chairman say. The emerging proposal is a departure from an FCC plan put forth last spring, which kept broadband classified as an information service, though Mr. Wheeler at the time made clear that he welcomed input on whether to go the common-carrier route.The plan now under consideration would separate broadband into two distinct services: a retail one, in which consumers would pay broadband providers for Internet access; and a back-end one, in which broadband providers serve as the conduit for websites to distribute content. The FCC would then classify the back-end service as a common carrier, giving the agency the ability to police any deals between content companies and broadband providers.

The emerging plan reflects proposals submitted by the Mozilla Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, though it departs from both in parts. The main advantage of the hybrid proposal, as opposed to full reclassification, is that it wouldn’t require the FCC to reverse earlier decisions to deregulate broadband providers, which were made in the hopes of encouraging the adoption and deployment of high-speed broadband. The authors of the new proposal believe that not having to justify reversing itself would put the FCC on firmer legal ground.A spokesman for the FCC said that all reclassification options are under consideration, including proposals by Mozilla, the CDT and others.Previous FCC rules have been overturned by federal courts.

In January, an appeals court said the commission was trying to regulate the broadband providers as common carriers but hadn’t designated them as such. Mr. Wheeler’s original plan would have relied on the FCC’s existing authority over broadband, while policing content deals on a case-by-case basis, depending on whether they are “commercially reasonable.”Net-neutrality proponents reacted to the May proposal by flooding the agency with millions of tcomments, many of which called for reclassification and a flat ban on deals for special access to consumers. President Obama recently called for the FCC to bar the practice, which is known as paid prioritization.

People familiar with the FCC’s thinking say the agency remains skeptical of a flat ban on paid prioritization, noting that even common carriers are allowed to charge for certain specialized services. Mr. Wheeler suggested in December that he would be open to some such arrangement. He has been careful since then to emphasize that the FCC won’t tolerate harmful discrimination, though hasn’t called for a flat ban.FCC officials believe that maintaining lower-cost broadband offerings could help close the income gap in broadband adoption.

The proposal would leave the door open for broadband providers to offer specialized services for, say, videogamers or online video providers, which require a particularly large amount of bandwidth. The proposal would also allow the commission to explore usage-based pricing at some point, in which consumers are charged based on how much data they use and companies are able to subsidize traffic to their websites or applications.

While the FCC still believes there should be room for such deals, its latest plan would shift the burden to the broadband providers to prove that the arrangements would be beneficial to consumers and equally available to any company that would like to participate. FCC officials believe reclassification would put them on much stronger legal footing to block such deals when they are anticompetitive.

After Mr. Wheeler last spring broached reclassification, the response was overwhelming, with advocates of net neutrality calling for the FCC to reclassify broadband. One industry official admitted the hybrid plans could be more tolerable “at the margins,” but predicted they would prompt the same legal challenge from the broadband providers as full reclassification. Reclassification “could not withstand judicial review,” Verizon Communications Inc. Deputy General Counsel Michael Glover wrote in a white paper submitted to the FCC on Wednesday.

Broadband providers say reclassification would give the FCC wide-ranging authority over everything from content to pricing and that it would curtail investment in upgrading and expanding broadband networks