House Democrats Refuse To Weaken Net Neutrality Bill, Defeat GOP Amendments (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday rejected Republican attempts to weaken a bill that would restore net neutrality rules. The House Commerce Committee yesterday approved the "Save the Internet Act" in a 30-22 party-line vote, potentially setting up a vote of the full House next week. The bill is short and simple -- it would fully reinstate the rules implemented by the Federal Communications Commission under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler in 2015, reversing the repeal led by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in 2017.

Commerce Committee Republicans repeatedly introduced amendments that would weaken the bill but were consistently rebuffed by the committee's Democratic majority. "The Democrats beat back more than a dozen attempts from Republicans to gut the bill with amendments throughout the bill's markup that lasted 9.5 hours," The Hill reported yesterday. Republican amendments would have weakened the bill by doing the following: Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules; Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the U.S. that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program; Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices; and Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy. An additional Republican amendment "would have imposed net neutrality rules but declared that broadband is an information service, [preventing] the FCC from imposing any other type of common-carrier regulations on ISPs," reports Ars Technica. "The committee did approve a Democratic amendment to exempt ISPs with 100,000 or fewer subscribers from the transparency rules, but only for one year."

Comments

Great

[Major_Disorder]

Nice to see the Democrats showing some balls. But it is pointless grandstanding at this point, as it will never get to Trumpy's desk, let alone him signing it.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The big players on the Internet don't actually want net neutrality. Much like privacy regulations and Warren's dumb "data breach" law, these are laws that are intended to keep new players from harming established players. Net neutrality would help new players, so the big players don't really want it. They have to keep up appearances, so they'll claim to like it as an advertising push, but they don't really care any more. They can afford to put pressure on ISPs and even with the ISP monopolies the US has, no monopoly is going to block Google or Amazon.

Net neutrality is dead and will stay dead because you can bet the instant the Democrats have the ability to pass such a bill they'll all of a sudden forget about it. Voters don't really care about net neutrality, as long as their Facebook and YouTube works. And since no ISP would be insane enough to block those, voters don't care. New comers are screwed though, and that's just the way established players like it.

Re:Great

[Immerman]

Mueller explicitly did NOT exonerate Trump. There's a world of difference between "he didn't do it" and "there's not enough evidence to justify trying to impeach a sitting president, when the Senate that would have to convict him obviously has no desire to do so".

Not to mention, we have NO idea what's actually in the report itself, since Barr refuses to allow it to be released, while misrepresenting its contents in a laughably short summary.

Re:Great

[Immerman]

It's a sad day when many of our ballsiest Representatives are those that don't actually have any. Maybe it's because without them, the corporations can't get a firm grip?

Re:Great

[Immerman]

You're assuming we're able to flip the Senate in 2020, which would need a far more decisive turnaround than we managed in 2018.

Also, that voting would go along party lines, which seems questionable for the Democratic party, given the resistance it's putting up against the progressives.

Re:Great

[ilsaloving]

I don't think it's so much about balls, as a critical realization:

The Republicans have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will do their best to fuck up anything that the Democrats try to do, no matter how constructive and needful an idea it is.

Republicans think they have a mandate to block anything Democrat, and that mandate overrides everything else includes basic good sense.

Obama's greatest mistake (in hindsight) was that he tried to create a bridge with the Republicans. Republicans do not want to bridge the gulf. They don't want compromise. They want to "beat" the Democrats no matter the cost. Hell, they had the majority and spent almost all of their time undoing anything and everything the Democrats wanted, no matter how inane, rather than actually governing the bloody country.

And they proved it again with this legislation by trying to hamstringing it to the point of uselessness, despite literally the entire country (not counting telecoms) wanting it.

The Democrats did the right thing.

Re:Great

[Darinbob]

The crying came originally from the left and the right and the center. It was not a partisan issue until the anti-regulation nuts got involved and the big telecoms started donating money to get it defeated.

Re:Great

[Darinbob]

Big players want net neutrality, and different big players do not want net neutrality. It's basically a fight between two different groups of corporations.

Re:Great

[Darinbob]

Jesus, get over it already, Obama won in 2008 and the same people who bitched and moaned about him for 8 years and declared from the highest pulpits that they would keep him to a one term president and now the mental giants who declare "now that our guy is in office, we want you to shut up!"

So which is, we're only allowed to criticize Democratic politicians who win but have to keep quiet about Republican presidents? There's so much hypocrisy out there it's ridiculous, but that's the nature of politics. Spend four years in a investigation of Bill Clinton with nothing substantial to show for it, but literally some of the same people who were cheerleading that witchhunt were the ones insisting that there should have been no investigation this time. More hypocrisy.

The only real political ideals anyone has these days is "our guys good, your guys bad!" Anyone sane in this country is opting out of politics.

Re:Member when?

[sjames]

That's not how you boil a frog...

Re:It's not pointless

[WaffleMonster]

The point is to get the GOP on record supporting something that will likely raise your cable bill (or phone bill if you're on DSL). That's an issue that can resonate with voters. From there it becomes election fodder to win seats and push the presidency over the edge.

The democratic bill allows FCC to impose regressive USF taxes on Internet access. They didn't have to do that. The democrats could have done a clean NN bill. They elected not to.