The Internet is currently full of news articles describing how the FCC will soon be putting to bed the last vestiges of its order a few years ago to eliminate net neutrality rules. The order that is widely being called the net neutrality ruling was a far-reaching change at the FCC that essentially wrote the FCC out of any role in regulating broadband.

Eliminating net neutrality rules was only a small part of that order. Net neutrality is a set of principles that describe how ISPs and network owners are to not discriminate between bits carried over the Internet. Most of the largest ISPs said that they could live with the net neutrality principles, and eliminating net neutrality was not a high priority for companies like AT&T and Comcast. The real priority for the big ISPs was to take advantage of a friendly FCC that was open and willing to deregulated broadband—particularly willing to eliminate any threat of broadband rate regulation.

So when you read the flood or articles this month talking about net neutrality, you need to substitute the term ‘net neutrality’ with ‘regulating broadband’ as you read articles on the topic. The FCC chose to disguise their attempt to kill regulation under the moniker of net neutrality and was successful since the average American probably has no idea that the FCC no longer regulates ISPs and broadband.

The FCC is holding a vote on October 27, just before the presidential election, to cement the last open pieces from the FCC’s order to eliminate broadband regulation. The FCC’s order to write the agency out of broadband regulation was challenged in federal court. The court basically said that the FCC had the regulatory authority to either change the rules (or not change the rules) to walk away from broadband regulation.

However, the court said that the FCC needs to demonstrate that eliminating regulatory authority over broadband didn’t impact three areas negatively. The FCC was asked to clarify:

• How eliminating broadband regulation impacts public safety;
• How the FCC can still regulate pole attachments if it doesn’t regulate broadband;
• If walking away from regulation negatively impacts the FCC’s ability to offer the FCC Lifeline programs that benefit low-income Americans.

On October 27, the FCC will take a vote to say that its earlier order doesn’t negatively impact any of these issues. It’s clear that the FCC wants to finish eliminating broadband regulation before the election on the chance that a new Democratic president will mean a new head of the FCC. The FCC has openly said that it changed the rules on broadband regulation in such a way that will make it hard for a future FCC to overturn its order.

A new FCC can obviously undo anything that was done by a previous FCC. However, the net neutrality order was done in such a way that a new FCC would have to go through the full cycle of the FCC’s processes that including various cycles of notices of proposed rulemaking, a final rulemaking, and then the inevitable court challenges to any attempt to reregulate broadband—all done with vigorous opposition from the big ISPs. The process of reversing the deregulation of broadband would likely stretch over many years.

However, there is a much shorter and quicker path for reversing the FCC’s order. Congress is free to reset the FCC rules in any way it seems fit, and Congress could finally pass a new telecom act. There hasn’t been any major telecom legislation out of Congress since 1996—during the heyday of dial-up Internet. In today’s political environment, it would take a Democratic sweep of the White House and both houses of Congress to get new telecom legislation passed.

Even should that happen with the election, the new Democratic majority would have to agree on what is contained in a new telecom act. I can’t foresee that being an easy or quick process. There is an accumulation of topics in addition to broadband regulation that would benefit from Congressional clarification, including privacy, regulation of web companies, solving the digital divide, elimination of outdated cable TV and telephone regulations, a national policy on spectrum, regulation of low orbit satellites, and a host of smaller issues.

If the Democrats don’t make a clean sweep of Congress and the White House, then the current FCC will largely have succeeded, and it might be many years until a determined FCC could reestablish any regulatory authority over broadband. What is clear to somebody who closely watches industry regulation—it’s going to be interesting few years ahead of us in this industry regardless of what happens at the polls in November.