Key House Subcommittee Votes to Undo Net Neutrality Rules
[Source: ArsTechnica, by Matthew Lasar, March 10, 2011]
On partisan lines, a House subcommittee on Communications and Technology has voted to disapprove the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules, <http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/its-here-fcc-adopts-net-neutrality-lite.ars> which were enacted in December. The vote was 15 ayes and eight nays.
"The Internet works pretty well. It's the government that doesn't," insisted Greg Walden (R-OR), who made the opening comments at today's House hearing. "There is no crisis warranting intervention. The Internet is not broken," agreed the subcommittee's chair Fred Upton (R-MI). "The market has not failed."
Minority Democrats on the committee mocked the move and offered numerous amendments that were rejected. Edward Markey (D-MA) called it "not just a solution in search of a problem—it's a RESolution in search of a problem."
The passage of HR 37 was a foregone conclusion. Both Republican representatives called the FCC's Order a "power grab," in a statement released yesterday. House speaker John Boehner (R-OH) recently declared that there can be "no compromise" on the matter. His colleague Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) accused the FCC of leaping "vampire-like" upon the telecommunications sector in passing the rules.
HR 37 reads as follows:
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to the matter of preserving the open Internet and broadband industry practices (Report and Order FCC 10-201, adopted by the Commission on December 21, 2010), and such rule shall have no force or effect.
Obviously, this language's fate is uncertain at best in the Democratically controlled Senate, which might not consider this resolution for months. One representative at the hearing, John Dingell (D-MI), suggested that the Senate won't consider it at all.
A perfect receipt for stifling
Following a break to listen to the Prime Minister of Australia speak to Congress, the committee heard testimony from a variety of witnesses, among them Robin Chase, CEO of Zipcar, the world's biggest car sharing company.
"The hallmark of an open Internet is the ability to create your own experience on the Web, without needing the permission of your Internet access provider," Chase told the subcommittee:
For example, if Zipcar had been forced to rely on the auto industry's definitions of car ownership—or worse yet, had to ask their permission—our vision of a fleet of personal cars being shared among unconnected individuals would have never made the cut. Our vision did not match their understanding of consumer demand, and our business model reduces the number of cars sold. Likewise, we cannot rely on the telecommunications industry to define the Internet. The industry would almost certainly believe that they know definitely what consumers want, and they would define the Internet as their new preferred "triple play"—their telephone service, their video service, and their idea of your ideal Internet experience. Such an approach is a perfect receipt for stifling innovation in this country.
Zipcar's CEO added that she thought that the Commission's rules did not go far enough. This was a reference to the order's exemption for wireless broadband from its provision barring unreasonable discrimination.
"The idea that different rules should apply, and that my experience of the Internet would be different depending on whether I was sitting at my desk at home connected, or on a park bench accessing those pages wirelessly is nonsense," Chase explained.
S. Derek Turner of Free Press concurred with this perspective. The advocacy group opposed the agency's rules because they "failed to adequately preserve and protect the open Internet," Turner explained. "But the passage of this Resolution of Disapproval will leave consumers completely unprotected."
Landing at a place
The telecommunications companies that testified at the hearing seemed ambivalent about the matter. James Cicconi, AT&T's vice president for Legislative Affairs, explained that AT&T was glad that the agency did not base its open Internet non-discrimination regulations on Title II common carrier rules, a proposal that he characterized as "radical." The company could live with these milder provisions, he added, especially after Congress failed to come up with compromise rules.
Cicconi called the FCC's order a reasonable and fair middle ground, "in comparison to the alternatives we were facing." His written testimony cited AT&T Chair Randall Stephenson's reaction to December decision: "We've landed at a place where we have line of sight. We know what we have."
Thomas DeReggi, president of RapidDSL & Wireless explained that the rules were "inappropriate," but added that the subcommittee should not "misinterpret [his] testimony to mean that WISPs [Wireless Internet Service Providers] don't support the principles of net neutrality," he added.
"In most cases, I have observed that WISPs have operated their networks in an open and neutral manner, except in severe cases of limited network resources that demanded reasonable network management," his written testimony explained. "As well, we feel it's important that consumers' basic right of Free Speech continues to prevail. We simply don't believe regulation is the answer."
And yet DeReggi added that blocking Netflix might be appropriate in certain network management circumstances. "Streaming HD video is the killer, transferring enormous amounts of data for a long sustained period of time," he explained.
An example of this would be Netflix selling on-demand HD movies. The truth is Netflix has no way of knowing what the end user's ISP's AUP [acceptable use policy] is. The appropriate action might be to simply block Netflix all together. Just like blocking the source of a spammer, instead of all e-mail. This would be reasonable network management, but could easily be misinterpreted by lawmakers as anti-competitive behavior. The portions of our network that can deliver 5-30Mbps to the home wouldn't have Netflix blocked, but portions of our network that had a community that had to share 3Mbps likely would have Netflix blocked.
Less uncertain was Ann-Marie Kovacs of the Strategic Choices group, who called the FCC's order "a transfer of wealth from broadband Internet access providers to application providers" that "will ultimately cripple the party on which the other relies for its very existence [and] is profoundly harmful to both."
Representative Walden insisted that a vote against the resolution represented a vote for an eventual decision by the FCC to establish Title II common carrier rules, once the current rules are struck down by the courts.
Verizon and MetroPCS are suing the agency over the order.
Anna Eshoo (D-CA) called the proceeding a "waste of time," that will cause uncertainty in the business sector and do damage to the Internet. "Today you are tinkering with something that is legislatively uncalled for and dangerous and unnecessary."
