Senate Bill to Block Net Neutrality Repeal Now Has 40 Co-Sponsors (thehill.com)

New submitter Rick Schumann writes: The senate bill to block the FCC repeal of Obama-era internet net neutrality rules now has 40 co-sponsors, up from the 30 co-sponsors it had yesterday. The bill, being driven by Senate minority Democrats, requires only a simple majority vote in order to be passed, although Washington insiders are currently predicting the bill will fail. "The bill would use authority under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to block the FCC's repeal from going into effect," reports The Hill. "And with more than 30 senators on board, the legislation will be able to bypass the committee approval process and Democrats will be able to force a vote on the floor."

Comments

Re:Allow right of way to the polls and conduits

[Rick Schumann]

The problem with 'competition' in this case is this: who owns the cables on the poles? Lots of smaller ISPs have to lease lines from, say, AT&T for instance. There's nothing preventing AT&T, in this example, from either saying "nah, we don't want to lease them to you" or "okay, but we're going to charge you up the ying-yang for them". Even making everything wireless won't solve this problem, there's only so much bandwidth.

Re:OK...

[RedK]

You know, instead of passing a law to order the FCC to enforce arbitrary policies set by a commission, they could use the opportunity to pass actual consumer protection type Net Neutrality rules.

Leave it to Congress to not do anything right.

Re:The Internet is a necessary public utility.

[Dutch Gun]

I get charged a pretty reasonable rate for my utilities. I see no reason why a fiber optic network should be significantly harder or more expensive to maintain than a bunch of water or sewer pipes, or electric lines.

I see a reasonable case for eminent domain here. I think municipalities should be allowed to pay market price to the ISPs for the fiber they've laid and set up last mile connections in local communities if they want to do so.