It's good that we disagree on things! There are broad delegations of power to the regulatory state that I'm OK with; I'm not a Federalist conservative. But my primary political issue these days is housing, and broad regulatory authority is the natural predator of affordable housing developments (environmental review, historical preservation, zoning variance and plan commissions, public hearings, &c), and most legislative progress in legalizing housing takes the form of sharply curtailing the authority of regulators.
In this particular case: I don't really think there's even a fig leaf of the grant the FCC claims they have. We were both there at the time, and I think it's clear from the text of the law and from the attitudes of the time that Congress looked at the Internet, the entire Internet, the same way it looked at CompuServe --- as an information service accessed through telecommunications links. The Internet is too big a deal for an executive agency to simply manufacture its own authority, simply because Congress isn't moving fast enough on it.
(If it helps: I also think Net Neutrality is dumb. I wouldn't stomp my feet and say that a Congressional act authorizing FCC rulemaking to enforce it was illegitimate; it would just be a policy I disagree with. Fortunately for me, Congress hasn't enacted that policy.)
In this particular case: I don't really think there's even a fig leaf of the grant the FCC claims they have. We were both there at the time, and I think it's clear from the text of the law and from the attitudes of the time that Congress looked at the Internet, the entire Internet, the same way it looked at CompuServe --- as an information service accessed through telecommunications links. The Internet is too big a deal for an executive agency to simply manufacture its own authority, simply because Congress isn't moving fast enough on it.
(If it helps: I also think Net Neutrality is dumb. I wouldn't stomp my feet and say that a Congressional act authorizing FCC rulemaking to enforce it was illegitimate; it would just be a policy I disagree with. Fortunately for me, Congress hasn't enacted that policy.)