The Eighth Circuit vacated the FCC's digital-discrimination broadband rules, finding the agency exceeded its statutory authority and misapplied disparate-impact theory.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the Federal Communications Commission's "digital discrimination of access" rules in their entirety on May 6, finding the agency exceeded its statutory authority on two independent grounds [1]. The court held that the FCC had improperly adopted a disparate-impact theory of liability and had defined covered entities too broadly, sweeping in contractors, landlords, and infrastructure owners that Congress never intended to regulate under the broadband-access provisions of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act [2]. The panel applied the Supreme Court's 2024 Loper Bright framework, conducting its own independent interpretation of the statute without deferring to the agency's reading [3].
The case consolidated challenges from industry and advocacy groups before a panel that included Judge James Loken [1]. The FCC had promulgated the digital-discrimination rules in late 2023 under a mandate in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directing the commission to prevent "digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin" [2]. The commission read that mandate to authorize disparate-impact liability, meaning a showing of discriminatory effect, without proof of discriminatory intent, would be sufficient to trigger enforcement [3]. Petitioners argued the statutory text supported only intentional-discrimination claims and that the covered-entity definition outran the statute's reach [1].
The ruling is a direct application of the post-Chevron administrative-law landscape. Under Loper Bright, courts no longer defer to an agency's statutory construction simply because a provision is ambiguous; judges must resolve the interpretive question themselves [3]. The Eighth Circuit's decision eliminates the FCC's principal enforcement vehicle for broadband equity, a framework that civil-rights and consumer groups had argued provided the only federal backstop against providers delivering slower or less reliable service to low-income and minority communities [2]. No comparable federal rule now fills that gap.
The FCC must restart the rulemaking process from scratch if it wishes to regulate in this space, constrained this time by the court's narrower reading of the statute [1]. Any revised rule under the current commission would face a political headwind, given the Trump-era FCC's skepticism toward digital-equity mandates. Affected parties will be watching whether Congress moves to amend the Infrastructure Act to supply explicit disparate-impact authority, a legislative fix the court's opinion implicitly signals would be necessary to sustain the broader framework [2].