this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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The thing is Congress doesn't have time to deal with technical details. That's why they passed a law authorizing the FCC to make exactly this kind of regulation. The conservative courts throwing everything they don't like under the Major Questions Doctrine is just a way to make sure regulation never happens and Corporations are free to exploit people however they want. The problem here isn't the FCC, it's bad faith judges with the power to stop the entire government.
Regulating ISPs as a utility is a pretty big change, not simply a technical detail; it is in the purview of Congress.
Congressmen aren't individually drafting bills, they direct their aids to draft the bills and hammer out the details. We don't need to overhaul our system, we need congressmen to do their job rather than offloading their job to the Executive.
Edit: Said bill would direct the Executive on how to regulate them as a utility at which point small technical details, as you mention, are handled by the Executive.
ISPs are just transmitting a different kind of data on the same infrastructure backbone as the rest of our telecommunications. Don't act like it's some huge difference.
And they are doing their jobs, they'd have to hire exponentially more staffers to go over what was in bills or just vote the way their preferred donor says to vote. Which do you think is more likely there?
Congress has the power to delegate regulations, they used that power, and now a radical judiciary is claiming the plain text of the Constitution doesn't mean what it clearly means.
One slight point, this isn't how they get legislative drafts. Legislative drafts come from thinktanks like Heritage, ALEC, Vote Blue, etc.
Oligarchs write legislation, and then find a congresscritter that owes them a favor. They "lobby" for it, ie they stop into the congresscritter's office, drop the envelope with the text, drop a check for their campaign fund, and then the congresscritter gets it to pass.