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House Republicans Roll Out Legislation To Overturn New Net Neutrality Rules
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and 31 Republican co-sponsors have submitted the Internet Freedom Act (PDF) for consideration in the House. The bill would roll back the recent net neutrality rules made by the FCC. The bill says the rules "shall have no force or effect, and the Commission may not reissue such rule in substantially the same form, or issue a new rule that is substantially the same as such rule, unless the reissued or new rule is specifically authorized by a law enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act." Blackburn claims the FCC's rules will "stifle innovation" and "restrict freedom." The article points out that Blackburn's campaign and leadership PAC has received substantial donations. from Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.
They know it can't get past the president's veto, and probably not past a fillibuster, but if they keep this up they PAC will keep lining their coffers.
I can't believe the bullshit I see from some of the "conservatives" I know who treat this like some kind of commie takeover of the Internet.
One guy I used to work with was trying to run an SMB network off his cable modem service from home and did nothing but complain for weeks about the runaround he got trying to get multiple static IPs due to ridiculous cable vendor policies (solved with some MAC spoofing/VLAN hackery in his firewall) and the pathetic bandwidth allocations he was able to get in addition to the general lack of alternatives in his area.
Yet this same numbskull is parroting this ridiculous "Obama takeover of the Internet" bullshit against net neutrality.
I just don't see how "conservatives" are willing to go totally rabid when it comes to government meddling yet so many (but not all) see outrageous monopoly manipulation and rent-seeking as just the good-old free market working like it's supposed to. I can't make this dichotomy make any sense.
The House doesn't operate under rules that prevent singular persons from bringing things to the floor like the Senate does. A bill gets written by a member, and gets referred to the proper committee. If the committee votes in favor, it goes before the full House for debate and voting.
There is no filibuster, nor super-majority cloture vote as in the Senate. House rules go back to Thomas Jefferson, and have been changed very little. The Senate was modeled after Parliamentary procedure, thus has some odd things such as cloture votes to end debate, which is the primary mechanic used for obstruction - you need 60 votes to close debate so that you can see if there are 51 votes to pass the bill.
Either way, the second part of your statement is absolutely correct. Even if this thing comes out of the house, and by some oddity of politics or monied influence gets through a cloture vote and passes the Senate, it's highly unlikely that the President would put his name to this piece of trash on parchment. Don't know if he's straight-up veto though - he'd probably want a piece of the monetary influence after he's out of office too. Maybe a pocket veto.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If you see any bill with "freedom", "family", "patriot" or "protection" on it, your first inclination should be to think that there's something evil hidden in the bill. And more often than not you'd be right.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
That fact that they happen to be Republican is irrelevant because both parties are thoroughly corrupted by the corporate interests that actual net neutrality threatens!
Both parties are quite corrupt - we know this. But if on some specific issue like this, one party or the other was not corrupt, that would be interesting. And that often happens, as the businesses in question pick one party or the other as the target of all their bribes for efficiency reasons. But that's not the case here. The safe assumption here is that any net neutrality laws will be a bribery contest between the cable companies and the content providers (mostly Google and Netflix), and anything shat out of that process is highly suspect.
Party doesn't enter into it - this is about the Senator from Google vs the Senator from Comcast!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.