It's funny how they always vehemently advocate for states rights unless these states rights get in the way of their agenda.
It has never meant what the words taken together would naively seem to mean.
If Clinton were POTUS and Russian ties like had been found to the Trump administration, she would have been impeached already. But it's their man, so let's look the other way. Same with State's rights.
And Trump is the magnification of the GOP.
We need to hold them accountable!!!
The sway of ideologies should be balanced with a willingness to judge issues on their own merit.
Allowing states to enact their own regulations in this case would be incredibly burdensome to internet businesses looking to operate in multiple states (so all of them), there's a good reason for net neutrality laws to be uniform across the whole country.
We should not be ridiculing people for not being ideologues. We live in a time when we need people to not be ideologues.
Inconsistency in the application of one's proclaimed first principles should be criticized unless and until the inconsistency is justified with reason and evidence.
Not all of them. Just the ones that want to lay cable in that particular state. Most internet companies are only concerned with deploying physical infrastructure to a handful of data centers, and leaving the rest of the connectivity up to their ISPs. ISPs providing major backbone links would be subject to the hassle of different state regulations, but ISPs providing last-mile service only need to care about the laws of the states their particular customers reside in.
That's a tricky question. At a high school civics class level, no they cannot create new law because only Congress can. But the reality of the modern regulatory state is that Congress has delegated much of its law making powers to specialized experts in executive branch agencies, including independent agencies like the FCC. So they can adopt regulations that have the force of law but are not statutory, though only to the extent that Congress has authorized them to do so.
Those regulations are for all intents and purposes laws. However, a federal agency's regulations cannot preempt state law on their own; they can only preempt to the same extent that Congress preempted state law in the statute delegating authority to the agency.
And yes, states can regulate where their laws don't conflict with federal laws or regulations. But there's a limit. Congress can enact laws which implicitly preempt state regulation because the federal regulatory scheme is so complete that it "fully occupies the field" leaving no room for supplemental state regulation. In which case, states cannot regulate.
I would be surprised if a court held that the feds have field preempted internet regulation, given how much it ties into areas of traditional state primacy such as property law. But who knows these days.
The FCC being able to pass and remove regulations in an area means Congress has created federal law governing that area and assigned to the FCC regulatory authority in that area.
Further, even with no federal law, dormant commerce clause concerns come into play.
States in fact do not have that right if the federal law implicitly or explicitly preempts them. It's a corollary of the supremacy clause.