Net gain: Markey touts neutrality ahead of FCC vote
A push to hand the federal government more power to regulate internet providers is key to national security and protecting consumers’ ability to surf the web without being blocked or “obstructed by money gatekeepers,” U.S. Sen. Ed Markey said Thursday outside the U.S. Capitol.
Markey spoke a week before the Federal Communications Commission was scheduled to meet and vote on a set of rules that would largely bar internet service providers from controlling how people use their networks and prevent unfavorable treatment toward specific websites, apps, or other forms of content, according to the Congressional Research Service.
“By treating all users the same by ensuring that anyone can surf the web without being blocked or obstructed by money gatekeepers, the internet can be liberalized and democratized as a force in our economy, in our politics, and in our society,” Markey said during an appearance that was briefly interrupted by a person shouting at the senator to oppose more wartime aid to Israel.
The FCC voted in 2015 to prohibit internet service providers from blocking “lawful” content, slowing down internet traffic based on content, and engaging in “paid prioritization,” or favoring some internet traffic over others in exchange for cash, according to the research service, according to the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan congressional entity.
But former President Donald Trump successfully tossed the rules in 2017, arguing they stifled innovation, competition, and led some internet service providers to not invest in their networks.
FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said restoring net neutrality will protect “internet openness by prohibiting broadband providers from playing favorites with internet traffic.”
“In fact, it has long been the policy of the United States that broadband providers are not allowed to block internet traffic, slow down services, or censor online content. But in Washington, the last administration took these policies away,” Rosenworcel said during the event with Markey.
The 2017 repeal of net neutrality generated a furor across the country, with some supporters of the measure alleging its removal would amount to the end of the modern internet. Markey touted similar claims, including arguing the internet would turn into “a digital oligarchy.”
Critics of this year’s rule, like Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, have said the narrative used in 2017 was one “the greatest hoaxes in regulatory history.”
“It was a viral disinformation campaign replete with requisite doses of Orwellian wordplay. Lots of discussion about ‘net neutrality’ and virtually none about the actual issue before the FCC: Title II and the agency’s application of sweeping, 1930s-era utility regulations to the internet,” Carr said in an Oct. 19, 2023 dissent to the proposed rules from the FCC.
Carr, who has been nominated to his post by both Trump and President Joe Biden, said the rules the FCC is scheduled to take up on April 25 are “vast and expansive utility-style controls to the internet.”
The public “deserves an honest debate” about internet regulation, he said.
“We should be talking about whether it makes sense for this agency to apply 1930s-era government controls to the modern Internet. We should be talking about whether Washington should reserve to itself the freewheeling power to micromanage how networks function through an undefined general conduct standard,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, said the Trump administration left “no cop on the beat” when they repealed net neutrality rules seven years ago.
“I think it’s one of the top reasons we must reestablish net neutrality,” she said Thursday.