How many people do you know pick their ISP because they prefer their DNS services?
Phone companies are information services because they mailed you a shitty phone book!
What an absolute bullshit argument.
Back when the law was written, people actually used the services offered by their ISP and they were differentiating services for their subscribers. CompuServ newsgroups, Prodigy message boards, people generally used their ISP provided email services as their primary email, many services offered their own portals for their customers which were quite popular (remember AOL keywords?).
None of that is true anymore. Nobody gives a shit about some landing page portal the ISP makes anymore, if they even bother reskinning Yahoo.
ISPs are information services because in the context of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that's what the Internet was, an information service built on top of telecommunication services. If you passed a Telecommunications Act of 2025, it would be different, but that act has not in fact passed, and what the court is fixated on is what Congress actually authorized.
> ISPs are information services because in the context of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that's what the Internet was, an information service built on top of telecommunication services.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 did not define what ISPs are. It defined "information services" and "telecommunication services". Then and now, those definitions are what matter, and companies today need to be classified under those definitions with no legal weight given to whether people today or in 1996 would call any given company an ISP based on a vague colloquial notion of what ISP means—because whether or not something is "an ISP" doesn't answer the question of whether it meets the definitions of an "information service" or a "telecommunication service".
I'm sorry, I've read this multiple times and I still don't understand how you're reaching the conclusion that lawmakers in 1996 would have intended ISPs to be considered basic telecommunication service providers as opposed to "information services" given the Telecommunications Act rubric.
But I also think everyone on this thread has laid out their cases in enough detail that we're mostly moving in circles now.
I think maybe you're just ignoring half of what I'm saying. I think today's ISPs are offering telecommunications services (by virtue of owning the last-mile physical infrastructure), usually with some information services on top. I simply refuse to pretend that putting both under the same price tag makes the telecommunications service stop existing in the eyes of the law.
You wish I was making a wrong determination of mutually-exclusive A vs B, when I'm arguing for A+B over B with magically disappearing A.
I understand what you're saying. I even agree with it: I think, in 2025, that is clearly a more sensible target for legislation†; that's what I'd expect a court to say those words meant, if they were written today. But they weren't written today. They were written in 1996, in the context of a bill deregulating local POTS phone service, and the 1996 context is the one the statute will be read in --- especially since the statute doesn't explicitly authorize any of what the FCC purported to do here!
One reason I'm pretty confident with my argument here is that I'm simply restating what the appeals court decision actually says; as passionately as you might want to argue to the contrary, the FCC's interpretation of the statute has been overturned. The Supreme Court seems extremely unlikely to pick this up, not least since the court already ruled in this direction in Brand X.
† Not that I think that would be good legislation! I think all of this is a bit silly.
> that is clearly a more sensible target for legislation†; that's what I'd expect a court to say those words meant, if they were written today.
You're acting like because ISPs of 1996 fit the definition of an information service in 1996 every org claiming to be an ISP should always be classified as an information service even if their roles in society radically changed.
If a law targets people aged 21 and up, and several years passed, you don't then say "well back when this law was written you weren't 21 so you somehow aren't in this definition", no, you look at the language of the law and see how it applies to the people today.
In that same vein we should look at what an ISP does today, look at the words in the law as written, and decide which bucket they belong in: information service or telecommunications service. And they really don't do a damn thing like what an ISP did as an information service did in 1996. And they're also now largely those RBOCs that were targeted as telecommunications services and have the same market complications as they did back then.
> In short, an “information service” manipulates data, while a “telecommunications service” does not.
In 1996 I'd agree that people subscribed to a particular ISP because of how they manipulated data. These days nobody uses any of the information services provided by an ISP, they're entirely vestigial and ignored. Nobody cares about the ISPs portal or their email services or whatever and they shut down their newsgroups and what not ages ago. All they use their ISP for is to telecommunicate, not to manipulate their data.
You're acting like because ISPs of 1996 fit the definition of an information service in 1996 every org claiming to be an ISP should always be classified as an information service even if their roles in society radically changed.
So if a company that on paper was GTE started selling hot dogs from a cart they wouldn't be subject to food regulations right? Because they're an information service, not a food vendor!
Or maybe we should apply the laws as they are today to the actions organizations are today instead of imaging what they were in '96 and thinking they've never changed.
> In short, an “information service” manipulates data, while a “telecommunications service” does not.
I will forever respond to your comments with this quote until you really answer how an ISP substantively manipulated my POST request to Hacker News. This is the standard the court gave us. Tell me how my ISP is an information service here.
There aren't Internet neutrality regulations. If there was a statute requiring net neutrality, you would have a point. The FCC invented their regulations out of whole cloth, and they were never granted that authority by Congress, which is why those regulations were just overturned. Yes: if AT&T, Bell Atlantic, Comcast, the Longmont Colorado municipal fiber network, Moviephone, or the Chicago Public Library decided to start selling hot dogs from a cart, they would be subject to food regulations, because those exist.
Since the FCC's entire premise for coming up with neutrality regulations was that they were granted this authority by the text of the Telecommunications Act, it matters a great deal that the Act never mentions ISPs at all, and chiefly concerns itself with deregulation of local POTS phone service.
This strategy you have of deciding that ISPs are bad and Net Neutrality is good and then working backwards to how the law should work is always, always going to disappoint you.
Phone companies are information services because they mailed you a shitty phone book!
What an absolute bullshit argument.
Back when the law was written, people actually used the services offered by their ISP and they were differentiating services for their subscribers. CompuServ newsgroups, Prodigy message boards, people generally used their ISP provided email services as their primary email, many services offered their own portals for their customers which were quite popular (remember AOL keywords?).
None of that is true anymore. Nobody gives a shit about some landing page portal the ISP makes anymore, if they even bother reskinning Yahoo.