The FCC forms a group to create rules to prevent ISPs from discriminating against communities of color; the infrastructure law requires rules by November 2023
Context & Ripple Effects
This February 2022 move is the opening beat of a four-year arc: Congress handed the FCC a statutory deadline — anti-discrimination rules by November 2023 — and the agency responded by standing up a drafting group rather than proposing text outright. The delay between mandate and rulemaking left the door open for pressure on both sides.
That pressure arrived: the White House pushed the FCC to adopt strong rules in October 2023 over ISP objections, the commission finalized them a month later, and in 2026 a US appeals court struck the rule down entirely, with Chair Brendan Carr welcoming the outcome. The 2022 group's work thus produced a rule that lived roughly two and a half years.
First-order effects
- ISPs enter a formal rulemaking process aimed at their deployment and service decisions in communities of color, with a hard November 2023 statutory deadline forcing the issue onto the commission's calendar.
Second-order effects
- Industry mobilizes against the effort — by late 2023 ISPs were warning against tough regulation while the White House pushed the other way, and after the November 2023 adoption the measure drew opposition from ISPs and their GOP allies.
Third-order effects
- The court's 2026 reversal confirms that broadband nondiscrimination rules are structurally fragile: they can be mandated by statute, adopted, and still unwound by a changed commission and judiciary — echoing how the FCC's 2016-era broadband privacy rules were stayed before taking effect in 2017.
The trend: US broadband regulation keeps cycling through adopt-and-repeal swings as commissions, White Houses, and courts alternate control of the same statutory mandates.