FCC Commissioner Carr on Net Neutrality Milestone

official end of the federal government's net neutrality rules. Those are the regulations that required broadband providers to offer equal access to all content on the Internet, enacted during the Obama administration. Joining me as Brendan Carr, Commissioner at the f c C Brendan, if the FCC is notified of service providers blocking, throttling, or pay to play deals, what will it do? Well? Thanks for trapping me on. You know, consumers are passionate about a free and open Internet, and

that doesn't change today with our decision. If a provider does engage in that conduct as you just described, that's going to remain unlawful today as it did yesterday before our decision went into place. What shifts is now the Federal Trade Commission, the nation's premier consumer protection agency, will be taking that enforcement action as opposed to the f SEC taking the action. Nine states so far have enacted net neutrality laws or governors have signed executive orders, and

there's pending legislation in other states. How does a patchwork of rules affect the national picture that the FCC voted for. Well, I think one thing it shows is the tremendous amount of common ground that there actually is here on net neutrality. There's not a lot of disagreeing about what the basic rules of the road is. No blocking, no discriminating, no broken promises. Your point also goes to those should there be a patrick of state laws that do that, or

should we have one national law. For my part, I would certainly support Congress stepping in and codifying these basic rules of the road that there's really no disagreement about what we face. Of the FEC was something very different, which is this application of this ninet title to regime that was used in service of trying to get to those basic rules. So you you mentioned that you you know you would support Congress. The Senate has already passed

a resolution to reinstate the rules with bipartisan support. Democrats are less than fifty votes from advancing a resolution in the House. What's your reaction to that. Yes, that's one um effort that we're seeing in Congress that I don't support. And here's why. That approach would restore the Title to

based approach to net neutrality. There's actually other bills that have been introduced in Congress, in particular by some Republicans that would take those rules, those basic rules the road that we all agree about and trying those into law. I think that's a better way to go. Let's get those basic consumer protections that there's no real disagreement about in place, but let's not go back to this title to regulatary regime that opposes a lot of negative consequences

in terms of investment and deployment. Well, if you agree about those consumer rules, why didn't the f SEC put that into effect when it repealed the law. Yeah, there's no real there's not a lot of debate about the rules. What we face at the FCC was, again, there was this Title two regulatory framework that the f SEC applied in the very first time and then use that new authority to hang those very specific rules off of So what we did was we reversed that decision to apply

that broader title to framework. With that, the rules that were attached to it also went away. And so now there's a question of what's the best way to get that back in terms of authority. You can do that through the Federal Trade Commission, or you can do that through Congress passing standalone legislation. But our view is that we didn't have the legal authority to put those rules back in place once we return to a Title one framework.

So the f SEC is facing a court challenge over whether it had the legal authority to repeal the net neutrality rules that's by that two dozen state attorneys general, advocacy groups, and industry groups. Where does that stand and what's your position there? Sure, yeah, there's a number of legal challenges that decision, as there were legal challenges to the decision as well. Our decision to repeal Title two

stands on very firm legal ground. In fact, returning to Title one, that's the only legal framework that the Supreme Court has weighed in on and blessed. When the Commission applied Title one back in the early two thousand's, that case went up to the Supreme Court. In the Supreme Court blessed it. So I don't think there's any real issue with our legal authority, but happy to have those court cases play out. Were you surprised that there was such a negative reaction by so many people to your

repeal of the net neutrality rules? You know, people are really passionate about it, and I support that. I'm I'm I welcome it. I'm glad to see that people have participated so robustly in our process. Again, I think the differences we were faced with a narrow legal question about is title to right or is Title one right? And I don't think people are as passionate about that distinction. But when it comes to the basic rules of the road, as you note, I think that there is a lot

of common ground on those rules the road. When people fear that those basic protections they've come to live by are about to go away, that they're pretty fired up about it. I think again, that's just the distinction between Title two and the basic rules of the road that I think are going to continue to stay in place today, tomorrow, and the next day. Are you relying on the various companies to to follow their pledges of not engaging in

anything that would hurt consumers that we discussed before. So I don't think that we should trust our I s p s to dictate our online experience. I don't think consumers want to be fully subject to the winds of the I s P and we're not. We're not going to that regime. So if an I s P, for instance, enters into an agreement to act an unfairly or a non neutral way by discriminating in favor of an affiliated or unaffiliated provider, that's gonna be per se a violation

of Section one of the Sherman Act. So no, we're not relying purely on the good graces of an h S. And now we're not relying purely on the disclosures. Although those are enforceable, there's additional consumer protections that are in place as well. We have just about fifteen seconds here. What would you say to consumers who are worried? I hear you. I understand that there's a lot of concern out there, and it's really been the fears of flame

have been flamed fanned by some misinformation. The fact is you're going to continue to be protected online. You're not at the whim of your I s P. Strong consumer protections remain in place. Thank you so much. That's Brendan Carr, Commissioner at the f c C. The Supreme Court upheld Ohio's aggressive voter purging law today by a narrow five to four vote along partisan lines. Joining me is Bloomberg, new Supreme Court reporter Greg Store, Greg What did the

court decide? Specifically, Hi do what? What the Court decided was that, Uh, this procedure that Ohio uses didn't violate a nineteen law that's colloquially known as the Motor Voter Law. That law says U states should try to eliminate people off the voter rolls if if they're they've moved, or if they shouldn't be on there, but they can't remove

people just because they didn't vote. And the Supreme Court looked at Ohio's procedure, which basically involves, UH, if you don't vote one time, they send you a postcard saying, hey, do you still live here? And if you don't return that postcard and don't then don't vote a couple more times, they will remove you. And the Supreme Court said that was not um removing somebody from the data from the voter database just because they didn't vote. So what is

the history of this. So the history of it is is this law was designed to basically make it easier for people, uh to to register to vote, but also to encourage states to take some steps to clean up their databases so that the people who who so people who want to vote can vote and and uh, people who aren't supposed to vote don't vote. And that that law, like a lot of laws, had some provisions that sort of cut both ways, and it was trying to it was the court trying to figure out how that applied

to this Ohio procedure. So the liberal justices here voted as a block in descent. What was the descent focused on? So there were two descents, and Justice Stephen Bryer's descent, which which was written for all four of them, was was kind of technically focused on the language of the three federal law and and whether Ohio violated it. And he essentially said, look, when you send somebody this postcard and they don't return it, that doesn't mean anything. That

doesn't mean a whole lot. There's all sorts of reasons why they might not return that postcard. Um and in fact, the statistics show that very few people do the other descent was written just by herself by Justice Sonya Soto. Mayor and um hers looked at the bigger issues about voter suppression and essentially said, this procedure UH puts a burden on people when they're trying to go vote, and UH therefore we should be very skeptical of it. So how about this play out in politics and in the

midterm elections. So there are about six states that have fairly similar procedures that might have been at risk had the court gone the other way. UH. Those states will be able to use their procedures. Now, it's not a huge number of people that are affected, but in some states like Ohio that can be closely divided, it can

make a difference. So two years ago, UH, a federal appeals court UH barred Ohio from using its law and in fact counted the ballots or the counting of the ballots of people who otherwise would have been barred under this procedure. UM. And it's easy to imagine and a close election that that could make make a difference in in some closely divided states. Greg this was a case where the Obama administration had opposed Ohio's law and then

the Trump administration reversed that position and supported Ohio. It was Democrats versus Republicans as far as the Amiguus Briefs of the States are concerned. Why was this case a

proxy for the partisan fight over the country's election rules. Well, you know, it was what what I mentioned before the Justice so Mayor was talking about that this notion that these purging procedures are not there in order to the argument that they're not there in order to protect against voter fraud or anything like that, but to make it harder for people, in particular liberals and low income people

and racial minorities to vote. And uh, it ends up sort of fitting into that that battle over whether the bigger thing we should be worried about his voter suppression or voter fraud. We are in the home stretch of a Supreme Court term and we're expecting some cases that have really been high profile and controversial. And this is the sixth time the Liberals have voted this term as a block and have dissented as a block. Rather, does that portend future votes in controversial cases coming up? There

will certainly be some future votes like that. There have also been some cases where the Court has managed to gloss over a few differences. UH. For example, the masterpiece case for the Colorado Baker case from last week, where two justices from the Liberals were able to join UH with their more conservative colleagues in the majority. Um it.

There are cases like the travel band, cases like mandatory union fees, where in cases like partisan jurymandering where you have to imagine there will be some sort of ideological divide on the court. Whether the ends up being five to four, whether they can come up with a broader coalition, that remains to be seen, of course. So we have the term where Justice Neil Gorsich has replaced the late Justice antiin Scalia. Do you see any any change here or do you see just the same five four split

that we saw for so many years. It's pretty much the same five four split. Um, you know. And if if Justice Corsi resembles anybody, it's probably Justice Scale in terms of his vote patterns. So the one time where he did join the Liberals was a case involving a deportation provision where he, perhaps as Justice Scalia would have said, this provision is not specific enough to UH to apply it to somebody. It's too vague um in order to it's too vague to be used to justify deporting somebody

or subjecting them to mandatory deportation. And that's the kind of vote Justice Scalia may have taken, may have cast as well. But basically, when we're looking at the most of the cases that are dividing the Court along ideological lines, he is justice course, which is very much joining joining his conservative colleagues. All Right, well, Greg, we're gonna be hearing from you on Thursday again because the Court announced today that it's going to be having sessions have issuing

different decisions then as well. Thanks so much. That's Bloomberg News Supreme Court reporter Greg Store. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple podcast, SoundCloud, and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brosso. This is Bloomberg