Late Wednesday, Republican members of a key House Commerce subcommittee decided to give phone and cable companies absolute, unrestricted power over the Internet.
By a party-line vote of 15 to 8 they passed a "resolution of disapproval" that would strip the FCC of its ability to protect Internet users -- freeing up companies like Verizon and Comcast to block our right to speak freely and share information on the Internet.
This reckless action opens the door even wider to corporate abuse of Net Neutrality, the principle that protects our ability to connect with everyone else online.
Already, cable giants like Comcast are maneuvering to restrict access to competitive video services like Netflix; wireless carrier MetroPCS has unveiled a plan to block users' access to most video and audio sites.
The majority rammed this vote through without weighing widespread concerns -- coming from public interest and consumer advocates, and across the tech industry -- that this resolution is an extreme overreach that gives away our basic Internet freedoms.
The Lies Republicans Tell about the Internet
The House is already set to pass this resolution; it moves next to full committee and the floor. Hopefully, the Senate can muster enough common sense to kill the resolution when it crosses Capitol Hill.
House Republicans, on the other hand, seem determined to give phone and cable companies a degree of power over our Internet that is unprecedented in the history of U.S. telecommunications policy.
"Unfortunately, the debate around [Net Neutrality] has become immune to the calming powers of historical fact," said Free Press research director (and colleague) Derek Turner in testimony before the subcommittee.
The line of questioning from members of the subcommittee bore this out. At one point Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-AT&T) claimed that "there was no federal governance of the Internet" before the FCC moved an open Internet order last December.
I'd like to see Rep. Blackburn prove that right-wing whopper. Unfortunately, her time for questions ran out. Had subcommittee witnesses more time to respond, one of them might have told Blackburn that the Nixon administration put in place strong nondiscriminatory rules to ensure that abuses of market power would not stifle the growth of an infant network computing industry.
This successful framework was later improved upon by both the Carter and Reagan administrations. And with the Telecom Act of 1996, a bipartisan Congress recognized that in order to foster new industries, we needed the FCC to act to ensure everyone had open access to the information superhighway.
These facts are merely unfortunate road bumps for a House majority determined to ignore history.
Will the Senate Step Up?
It's now left to the Senate to stop this resolution. If they fail, the FCC could be barred from preventing these companies from blocking any website, banning any speech, and charging you anything they can get away with.
American Internet users need to choose between the open Internet that lets us view any content, anywhere, and the walled garden that the big phone and cable companies want to build around us.
If you choose openness, you had better do what you can to get your senators to reject this resolution.
Follow Timothy Karr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TimKarr
When did facts EVER get in the way of profits for this set of legislaturalists?
"Already, cable giants like Comcast are maneuvering to restrict access to competitive video services like Netflix."
No where did I say that was a Net Neutrality violation, but that this action is representative of increasing efforts by ISPs to impose themselves as gatekeepers to online content. Should the RoD pass the FCC would not only be prevented from implementing its recent order, but also from acting on similar violations that are of "substantially the same form," according to the Congressional Review Act.
FCC efforts to stop an ISP that blocks, or discriminates against, a legal competitive video streaming service could easily be denied should their rule be interpreted as "substantially the same form" as the Open Internet order.
There's nothing "inaccurate" about that.
Did you read pages
Where's the angst this past December when y'all called it "fake net neutrality". I guess that was just spin? So, what to believe from you now?
Mike Wendy - mediafreedom.org
See "Public Infrastructure or Private Monopolies" (http://www.cazitech.com/bigbroadband.pdf).
I try so hard to make sense of this stuff... but they really boggle me.
BUT Marsha Blackburn did Vote FOR: Patriot Act Reauthorization, Electronic Surveillance, Funding the REAL ID Act (National ID), Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, Thought Crimes “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, Warrantless Searches, Employee Verification Program, Body Imaging Screening, Patriot Act extension; and only NOW she is worried about free speech, privacy, and government take over of the internet?
Marsha Blackburn is my Congressman.
See her “blatantly unconstitutional” votes at :
http://mickeywhite.blogspot.com/2009/09/tn-congressman-marsha-blackburn-votes.html
Mickey
It does seem unlikely that you voted for her. Maybe the rest of this country will start waking up in the next year?
Read more: http://bit.ly/fCOFHk
Senators Al Franken and Maria Cantwell introduced what appears, at first blush, to be a decent network neutrality bill back in January, but since the Senate failed to reform the filibuster, it is probably no more than a symbolic gesture to appease us network-neutrality diehards. The best we can probably hope for, for now, is for the Senate to leave the FCC with its existing, self-limited authority and its crappy, loophole-ridden, pseudo-network-neutrality regs.
Republicans and a number of covert Democratic allies are handing over control of what information we can access on the Internet to a handful of corporations with regional oligopolies or monopolies. How their constituents are buying into that as a *good* thing is beyond me...