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by paulddraper 2862 days ago
> they have to look at all available evidence and actually come up with an argument for why the change needs to happen based on that evidence.

Make sense. Proving this seems like it would be an enormously uphill battle.

It would have to be an unambiguously wrong decision on the part of the FCC. (Otherwise, the court essentially becomes the FCC by upholding/overturning any "wrong" decision.)

Given that it only became a policy recently, and the current amount of debate...it's hard to believe that the court would decide that not having NN is egregiously in the wrong. But we shall see.

2 comments

> It would have to be an unambiguously wrong decision on the part of the FCC.

The court—in an APA challenge—is not addressing whether the decision is right or wrong, but whether the process by which it was arrived at was complied with the legally-mandated process. Whether the decision is wrong (ambiguously or not) is beside the point, though that might be relevant to a challenge on other bases.

Remember that the FCC has to explicitly provide their reasoning for making their decision. Those bringing this suit don't have to prove that not having NN is egregiously wrong, they just have to prove that the reasoning the FCC gave is egregiously faulty. It is a difficult battle, but not as hard as you might think.
Especially if the FCC points to things like the provably false public comments they collected as their reasoning. When they say use evidence like https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/1051157755251 it's not hard to prove that they didn't actually have reasoning for their decisions beyond "me and my lobbyists wanted it"
Wow, apparently that comment was taken from some kind of boilerplate. Who comes up with this stuff?

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/1051157755250