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When threats arise or issues occur, their team of seasoned cyber experts is ready 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for support. Visit Huntress.com slash Decoder. To start a free trial or learn more. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor and Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. I've been covering the fight over net neutrality for almost my entire career as a tech reporter. Over 15 years now.
The idea is that your internet provider shouldn't be able to discriminate between what services you access on the internet. AT&T shouldn't be able to slow down Twitter and speed up threads, and Verizon shouldn't be able to block Zoom because it owns Blue Jeans. It's pretty basic stuff, and after all this time, the Biden FCC has once again made it the law. The big telecom companies truly hate the idea that anyone can regulate their networks, and they've once again filed the lawsuit over it.
And until very recently, everyone sort of understood what the arguments in a case like that would be and how they would go. Like I said, I've been covering this for 15 years now, and it's pretty familiar. But then, everything changed. In late June, the Supreme Court issued a bombshell opinion in a case called Loperbright V. Riemando, which overturned something called chevron deference.
The idea that courts should generally defer to agencies like the FCC when it comes to interpreting ambiguous parts of the law. That means that net neutrality lawsuit is suddenly on very different ground. Now it's about whether the court thinks the internet should be neutral or not, not the FCC. And wouldn't you know it? The sixth circuit immediately halted the FCC's net neutrality order, and asked for briefs on how the Loperbright Riemando would change the case.
I invited Virgidhar Sarah John on the show to talk about all this with me, and you'll hear us really get into it. But last 40 years, judges have basically deferred to federal agencies when it comes to the details of interpreting law. Because the agencies employ experts, and we expect them to have really deep knowledge in their subject areas. But now, judges will be empowered to ignore that expertise and make their own decisions.
And with a dysfunctional Congress that can barely pass any laws as it is, the Supreme Court's decision in Loperbright is a major power of the law. That is a major power for the judiciary over the other two branches of government. It's a very big deal with some far-reaching consequences for basically everything in the policy world, from the environment to labor law to all manner of regulation. Here at the verge, our policy team has been tracking this outcome for a very long time.
So I wanted Sarah to come on the show to break down how we got here and what it means for the future. If it all sounds pretty chaotic and unstable, then you're not wrong. You'll hear us discuss that towards the end. Okay, Chevron Deference in the future of Net neutrality. Here we go. Sarah John, welcome. Nice to be on here again. I feel like every time you and I talk, we invalidate a different part of our law school curriculum.
So, theoretically, the law is built on a series of precedents, and this version of the Supreme Court doesn't seem to care about that at all. And they keep throwing out these foundational precedents. The Supreme Court just threw out a huge precedent called Chevron Deference. It's from the 80s, but it is foundational to how our government works. It's shocking, but not surprising that they threw it out. Let's start at the beginning. What is Chevron Deference? Where did it come from?
So, Chevron Deference comes from, okay, Chevron V and RDC. Essentially, Chevron Deference is a two-step test. And it's extremely favorable to agencies. It's a very simple test. So, courts usually just uphold an agency's interpretation of a statute.
What you're looking at is agencies have power because of statutes that are passed by Congress, right? And they're enforcing those statutes. They're creating agency rules that elaborate on those statutes and apply those statutes to various more granular situations. The two-step Chevron test starts with, is the statute ambiguous? So, if it's unambiguous and the agency has just messed it up, then the court steps in and goes, no, you did a bad job, and they go somewhere else.
The second one is, so if it's unambiguous, is the agency's interpretation rational? That is generally the laugh test. Is this interpretation anywhere in the ballpark of what a thinking, reasonable human being would say? And it's like, you don't have to agree with interpretation. You just go, oh, I guess I could see how a person would think that.
And then the court moves on with their lives. The idea is that an agency is best suited to deal with whatever field they've been tasked with. They have experts to consult. They've gone through this rule-making process where they've talked to all of the stakeholders, and they've come up with a rule that they think makes sense in the situation.
One thing that strikes me about the Chevron case itself, where Chevron difference came from, is that the agency in question was rolling back a rule. It was a more conservative, more pro-business move, and they were getting sued, and the court was like, no, actually we're going to let the agencies do whatever they want. And then they created this reference, the agency is now, the conservative court is saying, no, we've gone too far. We need to actually undo that.
And then it starts with the Reagan EPA, and an environmental group challenged their interpretation of the statute. And the court said, no, we're going to defer to the EPA because the EPA knows what they're doing. The idea was that they were going to make it extremely easy for the executive to function, and not allow it to get tied up in litigation.
Scalia was kind of big on this idea that judges shouldn't wait into stuff that they don't understand, or like, isn't their job, because the positioning of the federal government has changed. Conservative judges now take on this idea that they should metal in the business of the executive. They've made more of a power grab instead of abdicating power in the way that Scalia liked.
There's an idea here that you can identify ambiguous language, and then you can decide whether the ambiguous language has been interpreted rationally. This comes from Scalia, right? Scalia wrote the Chevron decision. He was the textualist. This is his framework. He had one approach to it, which is, can any idiot read this and figure it out? We're going to move on. And that has been reinterpreted into the notion that all words are ambiguous.
It's wack as hell, right? He is really annoying to read about textualism. And it was already really annoying. He'd pull out the dictionaries and be like, oh yeah, this dictionary dates to X-year. Ergo, it's the meaning of the word that's being used in the statute. It's absurd stuff. And what you have now is the errors of textualism. Are out there using linguistics' corpuses to nail down what words mean, quote unquote, the actual linguists are like, they're using the corpuses wrong.
They don't really know what they're doing. It's applying this tool in this really unthinking way to press forward with what is frankly a bogus legal doctrine. It's so frustrating. Chevron Deference created what you might call the administrative state. We have all these agencies doing all of these things. Explain what that is and why it is suddenly so controversial.
Even before Chevron Deference, we had a deferential standard towards agencies. What Chevron does is that it makes that test way easier, which means that courts just sort of get out of the way of agencies. And when you think about that in terms of administrative law, you realize that this standard has existed in one shape or another ever since the birth of the admin state, which is to say after FDR and the new deal.
And ever since we've had the agencies pop up, we've had an increasingly not for 40 years, we've had a standard where judges are supposed to let agencies do what they do and not question what they do. It's only more recently that that's been eroded. This recently is what I think is sort of an important foundational question. The argument in favor of Chevron, the reason people think it's cataclysmic is that it is what allows the agencies to function.
We give them a lot of leeway because we say, okay, the congress passed the law, the agencies are going to interpret the law and do some stuff and make sure the internet is free and equal or the fisheries are clean or whatever they're going to do. And if you take that away and you tie that all up in litigation, the government grants to halt, but there was a time before the 80s before Chevron, how did the government function then?
We had something for a really long time called skidmore deference and it's thought that we've fallen back on skidmore now that Chevron has fallen. So skidmore is another case. Yeah, it's another case. It's older. Don't ask me what it means. Like I pulled out my old admin law reference books to try and figure out what that could possibly mean. And all it said was we don't care about skidmore anymore because we have Chevron now.
So I don't know. I don't freaking know. I had my writers go and reach out and ask about skidmore. All the attorneys are talking about, yeah, it seems to be that we're we fallen back on skidmore. But I don't really want to tell you that on the record because I don't know what this decision actually means. We did have a differential standard before, but before Chevron, the door was a little more open to litigation.
And the idea was that Chevron was going to shut that down. Skidmore is really old. We're talking about the 40s. So we're talking about sort of the tail end of the new deal era. And that's when the agencies came into being like we don't have an administrative state like we do today before that. So we're talking about the lifespan of the administrative state. We've had a differential standard. And for the last 40 years, we've had a standard that is very, very deferential.
So that's what Chevron difference is. What did the Supreme Court do to it? It blew up Chevron difference. It overturned itself. And we don't know what the rule is anymore. So the case that overturned Chevron is called Loper Bright Enterprises versus Ramondo, who's the Secretary of Commerce. What is this case about? The cases about fishing boats. Essentially there was an agency rule that affected their boats. And they thought that this rule sucked. They didn't like it.
And they sued over it at every stage of the litigation. The courts go, Chevron reference. Your case has no value. We don't care. Maybe you have a point. But the agency made this rule. And the agency in this case was the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is just an agency that I could not care even like less about. Right.
So you get Chevron test and goes to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court goes, all right, we're going to take this case. And as soon as they said, we're going to take this case. Everyone knew the writing was on the wall. That the Supreme Court wanted to overturn Chevron. Why else would you take this case? I feel like everything I learned in law school is getting thrown at the window. You usually have a split in the circuits deciding differently. And you got to resolve it.
But this is deeply settled. Like Chevron is 40 years old. They took it because they wanted to over. That's what you're saying. Like there's only one reason inside of the usual framework for why the Supreme Court takes cases. They overruled Roe last year, which was even more settled. Right. Like it's even it's a much older case. It was way more settled. And they overruled Roe. So why not overruled Chevron, which is a younger case. Why not.
I think that that was the dominoes falling there. We've determined this is the period of time in which it is okay for us to overturn precedent. So why not do Chevron next. The ruling in Loper is we've overturned Chevron. We're sending this back down to the courts for you to determine if this fishing vessel has to pay this fee under the agency's interpretation.
The fee is like $710 a day. Like it's nothing. I think that's what's so wild about the Chevron cases, right? Like Chevron is about a bunch of stuff that normal people simply do not care about that should not affect our lives that we should not think about. Frankly, most judges should not have to think about. And the fact that this fisheries case has suddenly like had this like blast effect just to EMP going off across like the entire country. That's weird. That's super weird.
We knew this case was coming. We knew this was the likely outcome. You and the rest of our policy team started pre-reporting all of the ramifications of Chevron difference going away. There are environmental implications of the EPA, consumer protection, labor law, campaign finance. We're going to talk about neutrality and detail here. Basically every agency in the government is affected by Chevron difference going away. What are the big fears?
I think the really big fear is probably net neutrality like net neutrality relies on a Chevron reference case on the environmental side and the consumer production sides. We're talking EPA and FTC. There's a little bit less fear because their authority has been chipped away a lot over recent years. On the labor side, you have like workplace safety. Like if OSHA promulgates rules, how safe can workers be? It really cannot be emphasized enough how far reaching the influence of Chevron is.
Do you think that the agencies will get more buttoned up and have they issue these rules if they know they're always going to face a court challenge? All already are. Like the EPA has been doing that. The sort of sad thing about it is that when an agency gets the hammer dropped on it a little too often, they just get kind of skittish about doing brave things.
Whenever you think like why isn't the government doing something about this, my answer is probably that the agency in charge has been disempowered in some way. Even before Chevron fell, these agencies were getting chipped away. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Fox creative. This is advertiser content from Zell. The recruiter said all I needed to do was send $500 to cover mandatory safety training and the job was mine.
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Learn how you can spot the signs of a scam so you don't have to call the Safe Squad by visiting www.vox.com slash Safe Squad HQ. Remember, never send money online to people you don't already know and trust. What if you could remember everything? Everything you said, everything you did, everything other people said and did around you, everything you ate, everything you watched, everywhere you went, what if you could remember all of it?
On this episode of The Vergecast brought to you by Meta, we explore how AI might make that possible and what it might mean to be a person in a world where nobody forgets anything ever again. That's The Vergecast, anywhere you get podcasts. Today explain Sean Rommes from Standing Outside of the White House to ask Americans how they feel about a historic moment, their president dropping out of the presidential race.
Mixed feelings, I think it's sad but overall I think he might be making the right decision. I'm sad to see him drop out but I think it needed to be done. So I think hopefully it brings out more young voters. Joe Biden is considered as an anti-cris. I wanted to stay in this way I know Trump would have won. Now it's up in the air. But I just feel like his America ready for a woman and also a black woman so that's what scares me.
I just don't really see Kamala or really anyone else being a Bible threat to Trump. Kamala, Kamala. We need the facts man. I don't know. I think it's some fishy going on but don't pull me. I'm going to quote you. We're going to ask Vox's Andrew Prokop and David Axelrod how they feel on today explained. Amen. Welcome back. I'm talking to the Virgin editor Sarah Jong but what the Supreme Court did with its ruling that unlowned Chevron difference.
And what that means for some really key pieces of regulation like net neutrality. Net neutrality is a really simple idea. Your internet provider should not be able to pick and choose which content gets more priority. Your carrier shouldn't be able to accept money from Amazon to make prime video stream faster than Netflix. And you certainly don't want internet companies blocking access to websites entirely which would create all kinds of censorship concerns.
The FCC has been trying to get this done for basically the entire 21st century and there have been a lot of arguments along the way. But the simplest and most important part of the net neutrality fight is a pair of definitions. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has two sections called Title I and Title II. Title I loosely regulates quote-unquote information services where access to a network and the content on it are the same thing.
Remember this law is passed in 1996 so think old school AOL where you dialed into AOL servers to access AOL's content. That's an information service. Title II on the other hand regulates something called telecommunication services which are utilities like old school phone service that are much more tightly regulated to keep them fair. So just close your eyes and think about it for a second. Is the internet service you pay for more like dial up AOL or more like utility?
Yeah, it's ridiculous that we've been arguing about this for so long. Anyhow, during President Obama's first term in 2010, the FCC classified the internet as a Title I information service and implemented a relatively industry friendly net neutrality rule. But Telecom's hate rules and Verizon sued. And in early 2014, a federal court ruled in Verizon's favor and sent the FCC back to the drawing board.
So in 2015 during Obama's second term, the FCC reclassified the internet as a Title II telecommunication service and adopted a new net neutrality rule. The Telecoms of course immediately sued again, but this time the FCC won. But that victory was extremely short lived. By early 2017, the Trump administration wasn't charged and a new FCC chairman, a Jeep pie, immediately killed net neutrality yet again.
And you can see where this is going. The Obama administration passes net neutrality, the Trump administration kills it, and then Biden administration tries to bring it back. The FCC actually passed a rule to restore net neutrality back in April. But as we've seen, it's never that simple. Just a couple weeks ago, a federal appeals court, the Sixth Circuit put the rule on short term hold while it tries to sort out if it needs to go unpermanent hold. And that brings us back to Chevron.
Why the presumption that net neutrality is doomed now that Chevron has gone? The Sixth Circuit has said, all right, we're going to put a freeze on the net neutrality rules while this case is pending. And meanwhile, parties, please brief us on what the fall of Chevron has done to this case. We're sort of seeing this thing where, I mean, why would the Sixth Circuit ask for briefings on this thing? Why would they pick up the case?
Why would they ask for briefings on this thing? Why would they freeze the net neutrality rules if they didn't want to chuck net neutrality out of the window? Like, they could just not take the case, but they're taking it. That's sort of the assumption here. If it goes up to the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is aligned the way that it is, right? Like, every time we have a Republican majority FCC, they're going to vote against net neutrality.
Right now, we have three, two in favor of the Democratic commissioners. The two Republican commissioners voted against net neutrality. We have a Supreme Court that has a super majority of conservative justices. Of course, net neutrality is going to go away. I think that's what the assumption here is. That is very funny to me only because those same six conservative justices on this Supreme Court are very worried about social networks censoring what Americans say on the Internet.
And all of net neutrality is your ISP should not be able to pick and choose winners and lose. There's about to be, it feels like an ideological car crash if that actually hits the Supreme Court. Because it's very weird to say that the applications on the Internet should not be able to censor anything, but the actual pipes should. It speaks to the politicization of the circuits, too. For a very long time, it's been known that the Supreme Court loves beating on the 9th Circuit and the 9th Circuit.
Leans more liberal than the rest of the circuits. Sixth Circuit is a conservative circuit. The judiciary is very politicized. They're not supposed to be politicized, but it's like everyone knows this. And it's just this bizarre thing that's happened. The other absolute bizarre just coincidence here is that Clarence Thomas wrote the Brand X decision in 2000. Clarence Thomas is out there in every other dissent saying Facebook should be a common carrier. And like shouldn't regulate anything.
And you just get to this just weird wacky backwards place. We are going to roll up to the guy who wrote Brand X saying Chevron Deferon should be applied. The 9th Circuit got it wrong. And the FCC should be allowed to let Internet service providers discriminate traffic on their networks. In 2024 when he's like no one should describe anything on any platform and then ask him to say the 9th Circuit was right.
I truly like the mechanics of this are just bananas to me. I'm sure that if they weren't applying Chevron to the 9th Circuit they would have found some other reason to say that the 9th Circuit was wrong. Like the assumption here is that you're going to see conservative judges cherry picking what they think deserves deference versus not deference. Because now that's kind of more of a Lucy Goosey standard. Yeah, you can cherry pick. You can sort of go, yeah, you know what?
I don't think this makes that much sense. Let's dig into this a little more versus you go, I think this makes enough sense. I think this meets whatever standard it is that we've had after the fall Chevron. You sort of see how that operates where you have seen conservative jurisdictions freezing by an administration rules left and right. When I said earlier that the Loper break ruling was shocking but not surprising. This is kind of what I meant.
If you hang out in DC and talk to a bunch of federal lawyers they'll tell you that in many ways they've already been treating Chevron as functionally dead for a long time. And they've been structuring their arguments in court using other principles. But that's not necessarily easy. If judges aren't going to defer to an agency's expert knowledge on the facts of a case, it takes a lot of the tools out of that agency's toolbox.
And it means a lot more rulings about complicated, maybe even arcane bits of law and procedure. So when we sit down now to try to talk about something like net neutrality that seems like it should be straight forward. We actually just end up talking about the judiciary getting more political. Because if the sixth circuit examines the evidence on its own and makes its not so expert determination about how the internet works, the FCC would appeal that back to the Supreme Court.
And it's pretty clear, based on a 6-3 conservative court, how that appeal would go. People saw this coming that you would predict court rulings based on the political leanings of the judges in the build up to getting rid of Chevron. You also see it in the dissent to the Loper-Bright ruling from the liberal justices. Here's Judge Elena Kagan in the dissent. Quote, it is impossible to pretend that today's decision is a one-off, in either its treatment of agencies or its treatment of precedent.
She goes on to say that Chevron is as embedded as embedded gets in the law. The majority says differently, because this court has ignored Chevron lately. She then straight up calls out the majority in what it's doing. Here's a quote, the majority's argument is a bootstrap. The court has avoided deferring under Chevron since 2016, because it has been preparing to overrule Chevron since about that time.
That kind of self-help on the way to reversing precedent has become almost routine at this court. Stop applying a decision where one should, throw some gratuitous criticism into a couple of opinions, issue a few separate writings, give the whole process a few years, and voila! You have a justification for overruling the decision. So, where is this kind of circular logic going to take us? We'll discuss it after the break. We'll be right back.
Welcome back. I'm talking in the verge editor Sarah Jong about what overturning Chevron is going to mean for big regulations like net neutrality that get batted around in the political win. I feel like most people who are listening to us talk about administrative law and net neutrality might expect in 2024 for us to immediately talk about how this report is doing a paragraph over the legislature.
But that is surprising in the structure of our government. That's not the outcome that's supposed to happen. Is that just a judicial construct? Is that John Roberts in the conservative court finding an opening to take this power? Is that something there's a check and balance against? Is that just a pendulum swing? How should people evaluate that?
Did you get this thing in law school where you get this sort of very existentialist evaluation of the judicial system? Did you get that? I got that in law school. We did this naval gazing thing where you went, our entire sys legal system is based on a power grab. And as Marbury versus Madison. Yeah, we all did that. That's the first day of law school. You stare at your naval and you go, so we literally made this all up.
We are the ones who made up the power and no one out like no one conceived of this Supreme Court actually having the power to set president and overturned statutes and overruled the other branches of government. And there was just a crass power grab and we've built an entire system around this power grab. We looked at that and we just had a spiraling moment because it was like it was not necessarily a good thing.
We visited older Supreme Court decisions and they were like, was this justified? Did the Supreme Court actually have the power to do that? And then we started spiraling again. We were like, oh my god, these made shit up. And you just start, you realize that there's been a power creep over the centuries. And then you try to justify that in your head and find some way to like calm yourself down so you can move on with your life and have a career after law school without losing your mind.
How did we get here? I don't know, is it inevitable? Is there something special about these justices or this judicial makeup or the conservative legal movement? Or is this simply a progression of the judicial power creep that has happened over history? I don't know. I'm not a constitutional law scholar. I don't have special insight into these people. Maybe this was inevitable. Maybe it's not.
Kagan certainly doesn't think it's inevitable. She seems to think that it's highly irrational and that doesn't make any sense and that the Supreme Court is doing some wax shit. There's a part of me that finds it hard to get worked up about a precedent past when I was four years old under the Reagan administration that in its effect at the time was to let the EPA allow people to pollute more.
And it's like, have we built our entire country or like an entire functional government on that idea? That's weird. That's the weird first brick to build the functioning of the administrative state on. And then there's a part of me and it's like, well, that's just how it goes. You got to you have to move on. You have to operate the system in the federal government right now.
The way it operates is that we let Congress be a clown show. We elect a president and we assume the president is the king more so than ever. And then the president is to do a bunch of stuff and that is affected through the agencies, which we grant wide difference to because that is actually the only way anything it's done. And maybe that should change. Maybe the outcome here is a Congress should legislate with more intention and clarity.
And I'm just not sure if that will like that they're going to react to that this way. Oh, it's like this is not going to happen. You're right that this is not necessarily this is not how the founders quote unquote intended the Constitution. It's not how a rational human being would look at the US Constitution and go. If I wanted to patch the US Constitution to have a working democracy, they would not patch it to make the admin state stronger.
What we have right now is the admin state exists because Congress is so dysfunctional. The admin state has been strengthened because Congress is so dysfunctional. It's been weakened because you have certain interests who want to curb the power of the admin state for political reasons. This idea of making an admin state accountable by throwing like judges who are there for life at them. That's a stupid idea. That is nonsense.
But yeah, like you have these power grabs and these weird contortions around the government because the legislature is so dysfunctional. And it's dysfunctional for so many reasons. We can't even get into why it's dysfunctional. We shouldn't do that on this podcast. I also people kind of all know right.
Decoder is an audience of business people, people who want to be business people. If you're trying to build a business, you're kind of looking for some amount of stability. Right. You want some things to be stable. And the administrative state for whatever its flaws was at least predictable. Right. You're for the most part dealing with subject matter experts. They're mostly hamstrung by miserable bureaucracy.
You can pay a bunch of lobbyists to get what you want out of most of these agencies. Fine. The courts, in particular, this Supreme Court is anything but predictable. Pure coin flips all the way down, especially at the Supreme Court level with this composition of the Supreme Court right now. For example, just this Supreme Court, highly conservative Supreme Court, while gutting Chevron ruled that the consumer financial production bureau gets to keep existing.
You will just not predict that set of outcomes. Clarence Thomas continues to exist. And I don't know what he's going to do at any given moment. If you're a business person, you're looking at Chevron going away in the administrative state, being beset by lawsuits in a dysfunctional Congress. Where do you find the stability? Is there any stability left? Yikes. I mean, if I were a business person and I had infinite money, I would just start putting together more yacht vacations for Clarence Thomas.
If you're a business person who does not have infinite money, you're screwed. You don't know what agency rules are going to stand in which aren't. You don't have that stability. Even if an agency rule isn't favorable to you, there's something valuable in knowing that that's not going to change for another four years or whatever. There is that stability that's really just useful to have in the background, whether or not a rule is favorable to you.
And now you just left sort of weirdly reading the tea leaves. You talk a little bit about the Supreme Court being a coin flip. There's the coin flip aspect, but there's almost like a worse thing going on where you have lawyers who are like out there trying to divine from Oracle bones, like how any composition on a three judge panel in a certain circuit is going to rule based on how they know the personalities of the judges are.
You get together lawyers who do a pellet practice or even worse Supreme Court practice. A lot of it is them figuring things out based on a judge's personality and they know that because they know a guy or because they clerked for this judge or like their friend clerked for that judge.
And it's so insular and I think that it's presented to those lawyers as this beautiful thing about their profession, right? But anyone on the outside who isn't a part of this tradition or whatever sees it as corruption. I think I've been away from law long enough that I'm on the side of that's corruption. You've made that inaccessible to the people in a way that sucks.
One of the things that comes up on decoder over and over again is the idea that the law is not deterministic. We do have an audience full of product managers and engineers and business people who think it's a system where some set of inputs leads inexperably to some set of predictive laplots. And I've never really made the connection to well, if you make it not deterministic, if you describe it as it is, you get very close to corruption very fast.
Right, the judge is having a bad day, but they got an RV from a buddy. So the ruling's going to go against you. But that's like the heart of it. Like it's always been that way because it is just a bunch of people making decisions. Are you saying you think Chevron is going to make those decisions even less predictable in a way that edges towards corruption? Yeah.
Absolutely. That is the main problem with Chevron because you made things less easy to determine. You have sort of the what what did the judge eat for breakfast, you're getting closer to that sort of place. There's a lot in the tech world right now that feels like it's headed towards the courts. Copyright in an AI you and I have talked about on the show, but just a coin flip that a bunch of courts are going to have to make it a bunch of decisions.
A bunch of the crypto bros are openly supporting Trump now. All of those regulations are going to head towards the court even Trump wins in his SEC decides not to regulate crypto anyway. They will get to because I have to make the affirmative rule they're not going to regulate. And that's a lawsuit. So all the stuff is going to head back towards the courts in a world without Chevron. Do you think all these lower courts are going to say, look at this flood of garbage.
We actually need something else like Chevron, which is more or less how you got there in the first place. Right. You swing the pendulum one way and you're like, well, here's a rule to make it simple. And then you swing it all the other way like, oh, we made this complicated and messy enough. We're going to have to work a little too hard. Can we get a rule back battle takes some time. But do you see that pendulum just swinging back?
I think what's going to happen is that because you have so much of Lucy goes your role, like what you're going to do is be like the standard that is higher than Chevron. When you get a case that you don't want to deal with, you go, yeah, I don't want to deal with this. It meets the standard. Let's get out of here.
Get out of my court. Get out of my court. I'm done. I eat this thing for breakfast and I don't want to deal with this. And then you get a different case and you go, oh, I saw this on Fox News. I definitely want to take this case. Right. And then they take it. I think that you're just getting more of a choice to intervene. And I think that's the part that's pretty scary.
What do you think happens next year? Is there something you're looking for a case you're looking at that will help us understand how courts will interpret the Loper right rule? It does seem like net neutrality is going to be the first Chevron victim. That one I think is moving fastest, at least that I know of.
I'm sure there's other smaller cases that are probably getting processed, but I don't know what the timeline is on that. The thing about the net neutrality cases that it is a politicized issue. It shouldn't be like why should telecom law ever be politicized. It is so boring. The fact that it's a political issue blows my mind because it's a politicized issue. I think that we're going to see what happens because it doesn't seem like the fall of Chevron.
It is a politicization of the law, but frankly it is. That's how it's going to shake out. Thanks again to Sarah Drong for joining me on Decoder. I'm going to say I didn't think we would enjoy doing this episode. We had fun. I hope you enjoyed it too. If that's why this episode or what you'd like to hear more of, you can email us at decoderethroverge.com. We really do read all the emails.
You can also hit me up directly on Threads. I'm at Rockless 1280 and we have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at decoder pod. It's a lot of fun. If you like decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe. Wherever you get your podcasts, you really love the show. Hit us with that five star review. Decoder is a production of the verge and part of the Vox Community Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox, Nick Statt and our editor is Kelly Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The decoder music is by Brickmaster Syllinder. We'll see you next time.