The Federal Communications Commission can now no longer blame the White House for moving slowly on approving its controversial net neutrality rules. On Friday, the White House Office of Management and Budget signed off on a technical aspect of implementing the rule, and it’s now up to the commission to publish the rules to make them official.
An OMB spokeswoman said Monday that OMB had concluded its review of the information collection aspects of the rule, and the ball’s now back in the FCC’s court to move to publish and implement the rules. The rules aren’t official until they’re published in the Federal Register.
The FCC Chairman’s spokesman Neil Grace tells TPM that publication in the Federal Register takes 1 to 3 weeks. It’s another 60 days until those rules then become official.
The part of the process that the OMB signed off on regarded the burden that the rules would put on businesses. The process is meant to ensure that the companies’ reporting requirements aren’t too onerous.
Even when they are published, industry observers expect both public interest groups and service providers to take the FCC to court over their enforceability. And though some Republicans are still trying to block the FCC from enforcing the rules, the White House has said that the President would veto any such attempts because they would interfere with the administration’s national broadband plan.
The FCC’s net neutrality rules are meant to ensure that the owners of the internet infrastructure don’t behave anticompetitively and arbitrarily interfere with content and applications of third party providers, such as Netflix.
