The regulatory process requires agencies to make a reasonable effort to explain their decisions and to consider all stakeholders and relevant counter-arguments.

The regulatory process requires agencies to make a reasonable effort to explain their decisions and to consider all stakeholders and relevant counter-arguments. This is codified in the Administrative Procedure Act. Ultimately, the most relevant flaw in the FCC’s decision may come down to the following: Broadband has to be defined as either an information service or telecommunications service. The first is “the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information,” while the second is “the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received.” I’ll let you take a guess here and just say that to repeal net neutrality, the FCC had to engage in some rather weird semantic gymnastics to arrive at the answer it wanted. That may not hold up in court.