Ending months of uncertainty, a federal appeals court declined on Monday to reconsider a sweeping ruling issued last year in favor of the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules.
The Obama administration championed those rules, which have since come under threat by the FCC’s new chairman, Republican Ajit Pai, who has begun the arduous process of rolling them back.
Formally known as Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet, the rules allow the federal government to regulate the broadband internet market by preventing internet service providers from jacking up prices or playing favorites with web content creators.
In a short order issued on Monday, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Washington declined a request to rehear the dispute filed by the same coalition of telecommunications companies that challenged the 2015 rules in court — among them AT&T, CenturyLink and Verizon, which is the parent company of HuffPost.
In a separate opinion, U.S. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan explained that the court wouldn’t reconsider the rules, since Pai had already stated he intended to rescind them and make them into something “markedly different.”
The full court “could find itself examining, and pronouncing…
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