The downfall of Chevron deference could completely change the ways courts review net neutrality, according to Bloomberg Intelligence’s Matt Schettenhelm. “The FCC’s 2024 effort to reinstitute federal broadband regulation is the latest chapter in a long-running regulatory saga, yet we think the demise of deference will change its course in a fundamental way,” he wrote in a recent report. “This time, we don’t expect the FCC to prevail in court as it did in 2016.” Schettenhelm estimated an 80 percent chance of the FCC’s newest net neutrality order being blocked or overturned in the absence of Chevron deference.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan has made no secret of her ambitions to use the agency’s authority to take bold action to restore competition to digital markets and protect consumers. But with Chevron being overturned amid a broader movement undermining agency authority without clear direction from Congress, Schettenhelm said, “it’s about the worst possible time for the FTC to be claiming novel rulemaking power to address unfair competition issues in a way that it never has before.”
Khan’s methods have drawn intense criticism from the business community, most recently with the agency’s labor-friendly rulemaking banning noncompete agreements in employment contracts. That action relies on the FTC’s interpretation of its authority to allow it to take action in this area — the kind of thing that brings up questions about agency deference.
Maybe an unpopular opinion here on lemmy, but I think this is a good thing.
Chevron is a good idea in theory, give experts in regulating a specific thing more leeway to manage that. Problem is if you give a bureaucratic agency an inch they become maniacal dictators. They start calling bees a kind of fish and a puddle in your backyard a lake, they randomly change up their own decisions making normal people criminals overnight or vice versa, and sometimes they even just try to make their own rules.
If you want a law then make a law, don’t have an unelected bureaucrat issue an edict. If the legislative branch is a mess the solution is to fix the mess, not hand off their powers to the executive branch. Again, if used by level headed people it would have been great, but eventually after so many decisions that would sound too comical for a parody we can’t have nice things anymore.
Do you have any non-hyperbolic examples of this kind of overreach?
iirc they DID classify bees as fish but only because it was the only way they could enact any kind of protections for them.