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Commission’s prior, longstanding regulatory definition of
“public switched network” was in effect. Because the
Commission at the time had defined the “public switched
network” by reference to the telephone network, it is
unsurprising that Congress would have assumed the term to
have that meaning. But that assumption by no means
indicates that Congress meant to divest the Commission of the
definitional authority it had expressly granted the
Commission in section 332(d)(2). We do not understand
Congress’s express grant of definitional authority to have
come burdened with an unstated intention to compel the
Commission to forever retain a definition confined to one
specific type of “public switched network,” i.e., the telephone
network.
We therefore reject mobile petitioners’ counter-textual
argument that the statutory phrase “public switched network”
must be understood as if Congress had used the phrase
“public switched telephone network.” Instead, the more
general phrase “public switched network,” by its terms,
reaches any network that is both “public” and “switched.”
Mobile petitioners do not dispute that a network using both IP
addresses and telephone numbers is “public” and “switched.”
As the Commission explained, its expansion of the network to
include the use of IP addresses involves a “switched” network
in that it “reflects the emergence and growth of packet
switched Internet Protocol-based networks,” and it also
involves a “public” network in that “today’s broadband
Internet access networks use their own unique addressing
identifier, IP addresses, to give users a universally recognized
format for sending and receiving messages across the country
and worldwide.” 2015 Open Internet Order, 30 FCC Rcd. at
5779–80 ¶ 391 (emphasis added). The Commission thus
permissibly considered a network using telephone numbers
and IP addresses to be a “public switched network.”
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