Over the past month, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has hosted panels to publicly discuss the various elements of net neutrality. The Chairman and Commissioners did not take them lightly; the FCC held over six different panels on four different days, totaling more than 24 hours of straight net neutrality talk. Chairman Wheeler actively participated in all, either in person or through Twitter questions.

As the groundswell for reclassifying broadband as a Title II telecommunications service and creating strong net neutrality rules grows, the arguments against reclassification have grown increasingly shrill and desperate. Most recently they have focused on “forbearance.” For those of you not living all of your lives in the world of telecom law, forbearance is the process the FCC could use to decide that some pieces of Title II should not apply to broadband. As illustrated below, these arguments do not stand up to scrutiny.

Earlier this week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published a blog post describing the “rainbow of policy and legal options” available to protect the open Internet, contrasting them to other “monochromatic options.”

It’s easy for the FCC to set aside Title II rules that don’t apply in particular technological and market situations. In fact, it does this all the time.

Last week, Public Knowledge’s Senior Staff Attorney Jodie Griffin testified before the Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet in Washington. In a hearing entitled “Preserving Public Safety and Network Reliability in the IP Transition,” Jodie drove home the necessity of the fundamental values of the phone network carrying over to new technologies, as the IP transition moves forwards and underlying technologies continue to evolve in new and exciting directions.