EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: cdev on November 24, 2017, 08:26:56 pm
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In keeping to form FCC czar unveiled a plan to be voted on in just a few days to deregulate the Internet effectively triggering a one way ratchet which may become binding in perpetuity due to already existing trade and investment agreements and ISDS.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/22/fcc_net_neutrality/ (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/22/fcc_net_neutrality/)
"The 210-page document bears the title "Restoring Internet Freedom," which echoes the 2014 "Internet Freedom Act," a failed House bill floated on more than $800,000 in donations from US telecom firms seeking to gut net neutrality protections."
Its not clear to me if irreversible rights to ever deregulating US internet regulation would be binding, and enforced by international arbitral tribunals against it, if US laws did not allow it at the time the investment was made, or afterward (see definitions of standstill, ratchet, rollback, indirect expropriation, etc.)
The whole point of trade and investment agreements is to give corporations certainty. Otherwise, the US would be free to re-regulate the Internet, as things were in the pre-FTA past. But, is the creation of rights that violate a host state's laws a defense to violation of an investors perpetual rights?
Its not so clear.
See Desert Line Projects LLC v. Yemen
https://www.italaw.com/documents/DesertLine.pdf (https://www.italaw.com/documents/DesertLine.pdf)
and
Rumeli v Kazakhstan
https://www.italaw.com/sites/default/files/case-documents/ita0728.pdf (https://www.italaw.com/sites/default/files/case-documents/ita0728.pdf)