Ars Technica
Senate Democrats today filed a long-promised petition to prevent the repeal of net neutrality rules in a move that will force a vote of the full Senate by a deadline of June 12.
The Senate will have to vote on a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution of disapproval, which would nullify the Federal Communications Commission's December 2017 vote to repeal the nation's net neutrality rules. The CRA was filed in February, and Democrats today filed the discharge petition that will force the full Senate to vote on it.
This is the same mechanism that Congressional Republicans used to eliminate broadband privacy rules last year.
If successful, the Democrats' resolution would prevent the deregulation of the broadband industry and maintain rules that prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.
"The CRA resolution would fully restore the rules that ensure Americans aren't subject to higher prices, slower Internet traffic, and even blocked websites because the big Internet service providers want to pump up their profits," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said at a press conference today. "By passing this resolution, we can send a clear message that this Congress won't fall to the special interest agenda of President Trump and his broadband baron allies but will rather do right by the people who sent us here."
Democrats have better odds in Senate than House
All 49 members of the Senate Democratic caucus and one Republican—Sen. Susan Collins of Maine—have pledged to support the pro-net neutrality bill. Democrats have been trying to get one more Republican on board because 51 votes would typically be required for a majority. But this bill could pass with 50 votes because of the cancer-related absence of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Politicowrote today.
"There are a number of Republican senators who have shown an openness to potentially voting yes, and I know those Republican senators will take notice of all the constituent calls and emails they will receive today and in the coming days," Markey said.
Online services rallied for the Democratic net neutrality bill today with a "Red Alert" protest that involved "Reddit, Tinder, Mozilla, OK Cupid, GitHub, Tumblr, Etsy, Pornhub, Foursquare, Match.com, and thousands of other sites," according to co-organizer Fight for the Future.
The odds are worse for Democrats in the House. Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) told Politico that he doesn't think the Democrats' bill will reach the House floor.
"It takes 218 House lawmakers to force a vote via discharge petition, and Republicans have a 236-193 majority—meaning more than a dozen Republicans would have to come on board in addition to every Democrat," Politico wrote.
The House version of the bill has 160 supporters so far, Markey said.
GOP and telecom lobby unite in opposition
Republican lawmakers and telecom lobbyists spoke out against the Democratic bill today. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) wrote an op-ed for CNBC saying Democrats are trying to preserve "outdated, monopoly-era regulations." (The rules were implemented in 2015 but rely on the FCC's longstanding authority to regulate telecommunications providers as common carriers.)
"If the Democrats are serious about long-term protections for consumers, they should look ahead towards a bipartisan solution, rather than looking backwards and trying to reverse the current FCC's Restoring Internet Freedom Order," Thune wrote.
"Restoring Internet Freedom" is the name FCC Chairman Ajit Pai chose for his order to eliminate net neutrality rules. The FCC vote to repeal net neutrality rules is final, but Pai has delayed the actual implementation of the repeal, perhaps to give Congress time to negotiate a replacement.
Thune wrote that he wants bipartisan legislation "that would permanently ban blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization by broadband Internet providers." Thune's proposal would prevent the FCC from regulating Internet service providers as common carriers, however. That would leave consumers with fewer safeguards against unreasonable price increases and other problems.
The USTelecom industry lobby group complained that current net neutrality rules target ISPs without regulating the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. "The hypocrisy of such a reversion is particularly extreme with Big Tech facing serious questions and near daily headlines about its handling of consumer data," USTelecom wrote.
The Senate Democrats' bill is one of several ongoing efforts to preserve net neutrality rules. More than 20 Democratic state attorneys general are suing the FCC to prevent the repeal, and several states have implemented their own net neutrality measures.
Further more, as of my typing of this #NetNeutrality is trending on Twitter again and various activists have gone on "RED ALERT". If the mods will allow me, I want to avi and sig my support for the fight.
UPDATE: Senate votes 52 to 47 to block repeal of Obama era Net Neutrality rules
Source: Fight for the Future (via Medium)
This is huge. The US Senate just voted 52 to 47 to block the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality and restore protections that prevent Internet providers like Comcast and Verizon from controlling what we see and do online with censorship, throttling, and expensive new fees.
This vote is historic. And the fact that three Republican Senators ended up supporting it is a huge deal. Now we need to take the fight to the House of Representatives. Click here to contact your House members!
Lobbyists for big telecom companies are furious about the Senate vote today. They had hoped to use the “crisis” following the FCC repeal to ram through bad legislation that claimed to save net neutrality while permanently undermining it. Instead, we’ve got them playing defense, and you can tell they’re getting nervous.
Here’s the path forward: the Congressional Review Act (CRA) is somewhat of a blunt instrument. It allows our elected officials in Congress to overturn decisions made by federal agencies like the FCC with a simple majority vote in both houses. Assuming the CRA resolution passes the Senate today, we’ll need to immediately take the fight to the House of Representatives.
DC insiders and pundits claim that we’ll never get anywhere in the House. But … those are the same DC insiders that never thought we’d get a Senate vote today. Here’s how we can win:
In the House, we’ll need 218 lawmakers to sign on to a “discharge petition” in order to force a vote past leadership to the floor. That means we’ll need to convince all the Democrats, and about 25 Republicans, to support the CRA. And the clock is ticking — if the CRA resolution doesn’t get a vote this year, it dies when the new Congress comes into session.
Outside of Washington, DC, net neutrality is not a partisan issue. But with the Republicans in power, the big ISPs have been putting all of their eggs into that basket, spreading misinformationthat targets conservatives and trying to turn the net neutrality debate into a political circus. But we’re seeing cracks in that wall. Several Republican Senators have been openly considering voting for the CRA, while one of President Trump’s own high level advisors encouragedhim to support it should it arrive on his desk.
If we can seize the momentum around this Senate vote and mobilize massive pressure on the House, we could see a small landslide of Republican lawmakers who choose to side with their constituents rather than cast a vote against net neutrality just months before the midterms. Either way, we need to harness as much political power as we can coming out of this CRA fight to ensure that we’re negotiating from a place of strength in any future congressional debates on the issue.
We won’t have the benefit of a concrete deadline like we did with the Senate vote, so we’ll need to put tremendous pressure on individual House members, district by district, in order to get them to defy the ISPs and support the effort to restore net neutrality. We’ve seen that pressure from local small businessesis perhaps the single most effective method of influencing Republican lawmakers, so we’ll have to continue doing that, but on an even greater scale.
That means we’re going to need a dedicated corps of volunteers, signal boosters, and people spreading the word over the next few months. We’ll need to organize in-person protests and events, call-in days, canvassing efforts, online actions, and more. We can’t sit back and hope that politicians and big companies save net neutrality. Its future is in our hands.
Okay, I know this email is already getting long, but there’s one more thing I need everyone to understand. Last week, Ajit Pai announced that net neutrality rules will officially end on June 11th, that’s in less than one month. But the fight does not end that day. Not by a long shot.
When the FCC repeal goes into effect on June 11th, “the Internet as we know it” will not suddenly die. Nothing will happen right away. Shills for big telecom companies will immediately start saying “See? The sky didn’t fall, guess we never needed net neutrality in the first place.”
The big ISPs aren’t going to immediately start blocking websites or rolling out harmful paid prioritization scams. Not while Congress and the courts are still deliberating. Not while major states like California and New York are considering legislation. Not while they know the whole Internet is poised to attack as soon as they break the rules.
Even if the ISPs get their way in the end, the Internet’s death will be slow. You probably won’t even notice it happening at first. That’s what makes it so sinister. But over time, there will be less innovative startups, less choice and diversity of opinion online, less creativity, more centralization, less awesome. We’ll also lose one of the most important tools we have for exposing corruption, challenging tyranny, and holding the powerful accountable.
But we’re not going to let that happen. We’ve turned net neutrality into a mainstream issue for the first time ever. And now we’re building a movement to make sure that we protect it for generations to come. The fight ahead is not going to be easy, but victory is within reach.
Contact your members of Congress right now and tell them to support the CRA.
The battle still rages on!
Log in to comment