An emerging Federal Communications Commission plan to give the agency more authority to regulate traffic on broadband Internet networks is shaping up as the classic Washington compromise. No one loves the idea, and everyone is sure it will wind up in court.
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The broadband providers are concerned because the plan would expand the agency’s ability to regulate them by classifying the providers under the part of telecommunications law, Title II, that covers common carriers, or public utilities. They would prefer to keep broadband as a more lightly regulated information service.

The plan being developed by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler would treat broadband as two distinct services, the retail service, where consumers pay providers for Internet access, and the back end, where the providers pick up content for distribution. The FCC would then classify the back-end service as a telecommunications service, giving the agency the ability to police any deals between content companies and broadband providers.

Instead of a ban on deals with content companies, the FCC’s plan would put the onus on the broadband providers to prove the deals aren’t harmful to competition or consumers. That drew fire from some of the most vocal net-neutrality activists as well as Web companies that have called for the FCC to ban all such deals.

In the New York Times article on this had an interesting phrase: “The retail portion, the transaction that sends data through the Internet service provider to the consumer and which allows the consumer to access any legal content on the Internet, would receive a lighter regulatory touch.”

Who is going to determine that, I wonder?