One of the many ripple effects of Trump’s election win will be his selection of a Republican to lead the Federal Communications Commission. One of the top items on their agenda will be whether to continue the fight for net neutrality.
Net neutrality rules require that internet providers treat all internet traffic equally, outlawing practices like traffic throttling or paying for content to be prioritized. Industry insiders I spoke with predicted that a Trump administration will abandon net neutrality regulations.
“I can see a Republican FCC really backing away from a lot of these fights,” Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute, told CNET. “They don't want to win net neutrality.”
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Right now, the issue of net neutrality is unresolved after ping-ponging back and forth with every administration for a decade. These rules were first established in 2015 by the Obama administration, then repealed in 2017 under Trump, then reinstated again in April this year.
But then something happened that jolted the system out of this back and forth: the Supreme Court struck down the decades-old Chevron deference, which limits the FCC's power in ambiguous territory like net neutrality. The effect was almost immediate. A month later, the Ohio Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals delayed the reintroduction of the FCC’s net neutrality rules, putting the issue in judicial limbo.
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“Chevron is changing everything, and this is something that I'm going to be really attentive to, particularly at the level of the FCC,” Thayer told CNET in the weeks before the election. “It's how much a new administration will go to bat for the FCC, and I put that more on a Harris administration than a Trump administration, just judging by the comments of Republican commissioners.”
The wide-reaching effects of the Supreme Court decision are still playing out. The Biden administration said it produced a “convulsive shock” to the legal system. The industry experts I spoke with said that all eyes are on the courts but that a new administration could have an impact.
“The Supreme Court could decide that the FCC does not have the authority to impose the sort of network neutrality rules that have always applied to phone networks,” Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Project at New America’s Open Technology Institute, told CNET.
“If the court rules against the FCC, Congress will need to resolve the question. If Trump wins and the court upholds the FCC’s authority, the regulatory ping-pong will likely resume, with the new Republican majority at the FCC repealing the rules, much as they did during Trump’s first term.”
Brendan Carr, the presumptive pick for Trump’s FCC chair, didn’t address net neutrality specifically in his Project 2025 writing, but he opposed reinstating the rules last year, arguing they would increase rates and slow down rural broadband builds.