When the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality rules in June of last year, the Republican-led congress failed to hold hearings or investigate what motivated the decision by FCC Chair Ajit Pai, a Donald Trump appointee.
But that changed on Thursday, when the House Energy and Commerce Committee—now chaired by a Democrat, Frank Pallone, Jr. of New Jersey—held the first hearing on the net neutrality repeal, just one day after Pallone and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chair Mike Doyle sent an open letter to Pai lambasting the FCC head for having “failed repeatedly to act in the public interest and placed the interest of corporations over consumers.”
Though the hearing featured witnesses including open internet advocates as well as industry representatives, the proceedings also featured Republican committee members throwing out specious arguments that were apparently designed to distract from the discussion of whether net neutrality should have been repealed or not.
At least two Republican members of the committee made the argument, complete with props, that the law on which net neutrality regulations were based is “too old,” according to an account by TechCrunch.
The net neutrality regulations, like many telecommunications regs, take their authority from Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 which, as the name implies, was first passed in 1934. The law has been updated repeatedly over the last 85 years, but that did not stop Missouri Rep. Billy Long from arguing that the law was outdated, and even displaying photos of Thomas Rainey, who was Speaker of the House in 1934.
“Even Speaker Rainey would admit that a bill he passed should not be governing this century’s internet,” Long said.
“It’s hard to say,” writes TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldeway. “Rainey fast-tracked the entire New Deal and then died in office a month after the Act was passed. He likely would have objected to being used as a prop in this fashion.”
When industry reps testified, including Michael Powell, former FCC chairman who's now head of industry lobbying group The Internet & Television Association, they argued that the real threat to the open internet was not the big telecommunications companies, but Google and Facebook, an argument TechCrunch called “a red herring.”
“Net neutrality is about moving bits around without interfering with them, not what businesses like social networks or search providers could or should do with those bits once they have them in their possession,” wrote Coldeway.
After a witness representing Mozilla asserted that the company, makers of the open-source web browser Firefox, “would not exist without net neutrality,” Texas Republican Bill Flores responded that Mozilla has actually existed for about 20 years, long before the net neutrality regulations were put into place.
But while Flores is technically correct, as Mozilla COO Denelle Dixon later pointed out, net neutrality principles have existed and were part of the internet virtually since the net’s widespread adoption in the 1990s. It was only when giant telecommunications providers came to dominate the internet access market did the imposition of written regulations become necessary.
Photo By House Energy and Commerce Committee YouTube screen capture
