A number of edge companies—Walt Disney, 21st...

it would “stifle innovation,” run counter to January’s U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit net neutrality decision, and violate the First Amendment and copyright laws. The opposition represents an attitude of “Open Internet regulation for thee and not for me,” said Ross Lieberman, senior vice president-government affairs for the American Cable Association, one of the groups that suggested the two-way approach to the FCC. The edge providers argued in their net neutrality reply comments (http://bit.ly/1pf3RDi), filed Sept. 15 but posted only Thursday, that despite “suggestions by a few cable interests ... extending the regulations to edge providers is patently inconsistent with the limits of Section 706.” The section’s authority extends only to broadband providers to encourage deployment, the filing said. The Verizon decision “does not suggest that Section 706 authorizes the Commission to regulate other entities” to further the virtuous cycle of innovation. Congress intended Section 706 to apply to broadband providers, not edge providers, the companies also said, citing a Senate report discussing “the goal of ‘deployment’ as focusing on the regulation of ‘networks’ and ‘equipment needed to deliver advanced broadband capability,’ not on companies whose content, products and services are distributed on such networks,” the companies’ filing said. Subjecting edge providers to net neutrality regulations would have “troubling First Amendment implications,” the companies said, because if they were “forced to make their content available to all broadband access providers and their subscribers, it would amount to compelled speech in violation of the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court has recognized, the First Amendment protects against compelled speech because ’the choice to speak includes within it the choice of what not to say.'” Regulating edge providers would conflict with copyright law because it is “a fundamental American constitutional and statutory principle that content creators are deemed to have exclusive rights in their works -- works which often cost tens of millions of dollars to create individually, and billions of dollars to create in the aggregate.” As copyright owners, the companies “must remain free to determine how, when, where and to whom our works may be delivered,” the filing said. “The Open Internet rules originated from the principle that consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice,” Lieberman said, and consumers’ access to online content “can be blocked, and has been blocked in discriminatory manner by edge providers ... at least as often as the alleged instances of blocking by ISPs that edge providers commonly highlight.” Section 706 “clearly gives the agency authority to apply comparable rules to edge providers,” he emailed, calling the edge providers’ comments “weak and legally questionable objections."