AT&T previews lawsuit it plans to file against FCC

The Economist&#x27;s recent article on net neutrality and common carriage is fascinating and related: <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21641201-why-network-neutrality-such-intractable-problemand-how-solve-it-gordian-net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;leaders&#x2F;21641201-why-network-n...</a><p>Part of the interesting piece is the history of &quot;common carriage&quot;: &quot;The idea that certain businesses are so essential that they must not discriminate between customers is as old as ferries. With only one vessel in town, a boatman was generally not allowed to charge a butcher more than a carpenter to move goods. This concept, called &#x27;common carriage&#x27;, has served the world well, most recently on the internet.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve never doubted my support for net neutrality, and the legal history of &quot;common carriage&quot; makes this even more obvious.

Is AT&amp;T trying to muddle the concept of an ISP as something that delivers content and an ISP as something that hosts content? That&#x27;s all I can figure, here.<p>Especially when writing about the ability to decline service to customers. I&#x27;m not sure how net neutrality relates to AT&amp;T having freedom to pick and choose its customers. (Surely the folks that just want their content delivered -- Hacker News, for example -- don&#x27;t consider themselves AT&amp;T customers.)

Instead of wasting money on courts AT&amp;T should upgrade all their DSL lines to fiber optics, lower prices on their plans and increase bandwidth. But of course they&#x27;d rather just whine about how their monopoly is threatened by Title II. I hope they&#x27;ll lose big deal.<p>Though it wouldn&#x27;t help anything of the above anyway, since even with Title II AT&amp;T won&#x27;t be facing much competition. They&#x27;d be just more limited in ways they can abuse their monopoly.

AT&amp;T&#x27;s argument appears to be that since they are already shaping traffic and abusing their customer&#x27;s trust, they aren&#x27;t actually an Internet service provider anyway, so they can&#x27;t be regulated as one.

I stopped having any sympathy for AT&amp;T after the Auernheimer case. If they wanted to garner public support for any reason, a move like this is likely to kill it for a lot of people. Myself included.<p>(I know Auernheimer&#x27;s not well-liked, and I don&#x27;t agree with his politics, but he deserved to win that case on appeal.)

<i>&quot;I have no illusions that any of this will change what happens on February 26,&quot; when the FCC is expected to vote, AT&amp;T Federal Regulatory VP Hank Hultquist wrote in a blog post yesterday. &quot;But when the FCC has to defend reclassification before an appellate court, it will have to grapple with these and other arguments. &quot;</i><p>I might be misreading something, but is he not saying &quot;We know this is useless but we want to waste the FCC&#x27;s time and resources anyways&quot; ?<p>I&#x27;m not familiar with how lawsuits for these kinds of cases work, but wouldn&#x27;t this be enough for a judge to throw away any lawsuit they file? If they clearly state t hey have no intention other than to get in the way, it doesn&#x27;t seem like a valid lawsuit to me.

I hope the FCC has the balls to say, &quot;So sue me.&quot;

In other words, this will have to be settled in court.

While I don&#x27;t like Internet providers creating different classes of traffic, the idea of the government getting involved should terrify anyone who values innovation and freedom.<p>Soon, we&#x27;ll end up with a monopoly guided by regulations from lobbyists and using laws as a weapon against competition. That&#x27;s hardly better than the problem we seek to resolve.