Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm Amy Miller, MLEX's senior privacy and data security reporter in San Francisco, California.

As soon as the new Republican majority on the FCC voted in 2018 to discard Obama-era

rules that treated fixed and wireless consumer broadband services as a more closely regulated

common carrier service, a court fight was inevitable.

Opponents immediately sued to block the FCC's move.

More than six months later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit heard oral arguments this week in Washington, D.C.

Mike Swift, M. Lex's chief global digital risk correspondent, was in D.C. covering the hearing.

Hi, Mike.

Hi, Amy.

So it was a really long hearing, very long oral arguments,

almost five hours, right? It was a test of attrition, that's for sure. Yeah, it was a long one.

And they had very hard wooden benches, which didn't make it any easier. So, but it was very interesting, no doubt about that.

It was a fun experience.

So I'm looking forward to talking about it.

Well, what's at stake here?

What are the petitioners hoping to accomplish?

So their goal is really to essentially set back the clock to 2015 when the FCC during the Obama administration

decided that consumer broadband service needed to be regulated like a public utility basically.

And that way they could set up specific rules that would guarantee net neutrality.

You could have a specific rule against throttling, against blocking content, or against paid prioritization

where, you know, your local internet service provider would charge a fee to Netflix or YouTube

in order to get increased speed of data transmission.

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