[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

If the commerce clause covers a farmer growing his own wheat that he doesn’t sell, it covers internet regulation. The question is if the FCC is authorized by Congress to set the regulations nationwide for internet companies.

[pas]

Not so fast. The same clause also does not cover a lot of things. And ISPs are very much the perfect example of truly local things. And those are not covered.

But we shall see what the courts find.

[Vendan]

I don't have an ISP to talk to the ISP's server, I have an ISP to talk to the global internet, so it's very much not local...

[pas]

Your choices of ISPs is. You buy a connection to a network. Thus the trade happens between you and locally present businesses.

The interstate effect could be due to different services available on the network. So due to the lack of throttling the bundles that the ISPs like to sell wouldn't work, because you could easily buy Netflix or any other non local content.

[Vendan]

My selection of ISPs is local, but so is my selection of power companies, housing, heck, even grocery stores. I choose my ISP on primarily non-local considerations, so I don't think it's quite as cut and dry as you state. (i.e. I choose my ISP because of it's connections to other states and countries, not because of my connection to it.)

[pas]

But there's no market for ISPs where far away ISPs come and present their connections to you. Similarly with housing, even though it's physically possible, real estate markets don't go to the buyers, you don't see houses physically moving to potential buyers. Similarly, thousand mile cables are not laid down for everyone.

And out of state grocery stores don't go to you, even though you can go to them online nowadays. (And in that sense they advertise to you from out of state.)

So, just as you can pick a barber/hairdresser because it can show you the newest trends from other barbers from out of state, you still do the transaction locally, even if the whole hair-onomy might be global.

That said, this is a complex multifaceted problem. (Otherwise everyone would have understood it well by now, even Pai, and everyone would be on the same side, etc. Just as water is wet, the Earth is round, vaccines have amazing cost-benefit ratio, the climate is changing, and emission reduction is the right response, and so on. Ha-ha.) And ultimately we can reason however we want, it's up to some judges to figure this out.

If there were a federal law regulating ISPs, and the whole telecom market, and they were challenged based on lack of constitutional authorization, it'd probably get dismissed fast. (As there are already such laws.) But this is the other way around, and on top of that this is a set of regulations that don't clash with the federal ones, they are merely stricter. (And I'm completely out of my depth about the question of whether the FCC could write rules that'd give rights to ISPs that states can't abridge - or only Congress could do that. But I suspect it can, but only if the regulation has a substantial difference in interstate commerce --- which is the question, is there even an interstate ISP market, and I guess that there isn't.)