As Congress continues to try and gain momentum for its own efforts to save net neutrality, states and tech companies are continuing their own efforts in court.
On Monday night, a group of 22 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia urged a U.S. Court of Appeals to reinstate the net neutrality rules that were taken away after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rescinded them last year, Reuters reports.
New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, who is leading the charge among the attorneys general, said the brief filed urges the court to reverse the FCC’s order because it “puts consumers at risk of abusive practices by broadband providers, it jeopardizes public safety, and more.”
“Let’s not forget, the fight for #NetNeutrality is essentially a fight to protect the modern public square,” Underwood wrote on Twitter. “Corporations should not be able to decide who gets to speak, what they can talk about, and how loudly they can say it. But that could be the future of the internet.”
The brief essentially argues that the FCC did not take into account how internet service providers (ISPs) would “engage in abusive practices that undermine the open internet,” such as blocking or arbitrarily speeding up or slowing down content.
The states participating in the fight are: New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia.
Meanwhile, in a separate legal challenge, Mozilla and other tech firms and advocacy organizations are continuing their efforts to fight the FCC’s decision.
The group filed its own brief on Monday which argues that the FCC ignored the public record ahead of its vote to rescind net neutrality rules.
“It is imperative that all internet traffic be treated equally, without discrimination against content or type of traffic—that’s how the internet was built and what has made it one of the greatest inventions of all time,” the company wrote in a statement.
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