AT&T Friday joined the crowd of ISPs asking a federal court to reconsider a panel decision upholding the FCC's reclassification of Internet access as a Title II common carrier service in its new Open Internet order.
There were at least four separate petitions seeking en banc (full court) review of the three-judge panel that concluded the FCC had the authority to reclassify and was not arbitrary and capricious in the exercise of its authority. The judges did not rule on whether the FCC's call was the best one for the future of the Internet, only that it could make that call.
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AT&T focused in its petition, which was due Friday (July 29), in part on how the FCC appeared to have made its decision to reclassify, pointing to White House meetings and the President's public endorsement of Title II.
Citing the dissenting judge on the panel, who would have remanded the FCC's rules back to the commission, AT&T called the FCC's justification for reclassification "watery thin and Self-contradictory," and said the two judges who upheld the FCC rules was "erroneous and internally inconsistent."
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"Because the majority misapprehended both sets of statutory issues and their doctrinal interaction, AT&T requests rehearing en banc of this “exceptional[ly] importan[t]” case.
(Photo via Bill Bradford's Flickr. Image taken on March 4, 2016 and used per Creative Commons 2.0 license. The photo was cropped to fit 3x4 aspect ratio.)
