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Google should get it have you been treated like your local phone company? In the face of major Internet platforms, it has been an idea that should be regulated as a regular carrier or public service ostikoka around for a moment. But the news came in April, when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas ruled that the regular transportation law would allow Congress to regulate social media providers. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed a lawsuit in June to ask a state court “that Google’s Internet search offerings are properly classified as ordinary carriers and / or public utilities under common law.” Last weekend, it was published by Yost op-arg in The New York Times mentioning Google’s strategy in favor of its business in the face of competitors that rely on reaching out to customers. “As the legal touches go, it’s much lighter than the antitrust law would require,” he wrote.
Unfortunately, the logic is also quite clear.
“This guy has made such a mess,” said Barbara Cherry, a professor at Indiana University School of Media who studies regular transportation and public use law. “For the lawyer, it’s not bad at all.”
The first red flag in the Ohio lawsuit is that it doesn’t even try to define what a regular carrier or public service is. The second red flag Yost suggests that the two concepts are interchangeable. He wrote down everything he was looking for Times op-ed, is a simple statement that “by law, Google is a public utility or, in general, an ordinary carrier”. In fact, ordinary transport is not a more general species for public use.
“It’s misunderstood what ordinary transportation is, what public utility is,” said Cherry, who practiced telecommunications law before entering college. “They are completely separate bodies of law, and why one entity would get legal status with each other is for different reasons. It happens that some entities may be ordinary carriers and public services, but the reason is that they comply with both.”
The concept of public use, Cherry explained, refers to a business that has signed an agreement with certain levels of government to provide a service to the general public. In exchange, he usually receives a delegation of benefits or powers from the state. Think of an electric company that has the power to call a famous domain, but one that is subject to price controls.
“Public utility comes from the contractual relationship between the government and that entity that is supposed to be public utility,” Cherry said. But Google, to put it bluntly, has no contract with the government to provide search engines.
Okay, but what if Google calls you a regular operator? Here, too, Cherry said she is misinterpreting the Yost law. He explained that the ordinary wagon is a legal concept that comes from the feudal economy of medieval England. An ordinary transporter was someone who offered to carry something to people. Anyone who chose to do business in this way had certain legal obligations, including non-discrimination.
Originally meant “wagon” literally – ferry operators, for example. Nowadays, it can take more metaphorical transportation, as is the case with telephone companies. The overlap of the key is neutrality. “Ordinary carriers are, by definition, just a tube,” Cherry explains. “They don’t control the content.” That was the basis of the principle net neutrality The rule, passed by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015 (and repealed by the Trump administration), established regular carrier status for Internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T. Since ISPs are mere channels for data, it makes sense to avoid treating data differently depending on the source or content.
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