Court: “You Want Neutrality? Call the Internet ‘Common Carrier’ first”

K.S. Park, Open Net Director, writes that:

Duty of common carriage (i.e. duty of nondiscrimination) has been created and applied judicially to public utilities and transportation in return for the easements necessary for provisioning of the services given by the public and private landowners over which water, gas, phone lines and roads cross. The ultimate question, of course, is whether internet as provided through cable TV lines, broadband lines, wireless frequencies should be considered also a common carrier on which such duty should be imposed. However, in the US, the doctrine took a twist as the legislature took the power from the judiciary and gave to FCC who should be considered such common carrier. Now, for a political reason, FCC did not designate the internet access as common carriage but still tried to impose common carriage duty, and in the January decision, the Appeals Court said ‘no, you can’t do that. if you want to do that, you must designate the Internet as common carrier first.’ Therefore, now it is up to FCC to decide whether to reclassify the Internet if it wishes to impose net neutrality duties on the internet service providers.

Read Korean original here.