Democrats drop Net Neutrality in the House
One of the more controversial bills in the eyes of many bloggers that the Congress was supposed to take up this term was Net Neutrality. But yesterday House Democrats shelved the idea–at least for the short term–handing Barack Obama yet another defeat heading into the mid-term elections.
Many people believe that Net Neutrality is a means for the federal government to get a foot in the backdoor in regards to regulating the internet, but for this post I want to focus on something that Henry Waxman said after this bill failed that I found interesting.
When speaking of the shelving of the bill, Henry Waxman said, “if Congress can’t act, the FCC must.” Letting big, bloated government agencies attempt to pass laws that fail to pass into law using the proper, constitutional procedure seems to be becoming a more acceptable alternative to the Democrats in the Congress and to Barack Obama.
The EPA is in the process of trying to institute Barack Obama’s cap and trade proposal which was unable to get through the Congress, and now we have a member of the House advocating for the FCC to dictate into law something that could not pass into law in the legal, constitutional manner.
But this is more than just one person advocating for the FCC to take up where the Congress left off on this idea because the FCC has already been trying to find a way to regulate the internet more strictly. The FCC has already tried to reclassify the internet in an attempt to extend its reach into the cyberworld, but that attempt was struck down by the Supreme Court.
The FCC is now going to try to find another avenue in which it feels it will be able to extend its authority over the internet regardless of the Supreme Court decision that told the FCC they overstepped their authority.
Here is a statement by the president of the special interest group Public Knowledge:
The FCC must act now to protect consumers by reinstating its authority over broadband,” Gigi Sohn, president of the public interest group Public Knowledge, said in a statement. “We expect the FCC to do so to carry out one of the fundamental promises of the Obama administration.”
There you have it, she fully expects the FCC to implement one of Barack Obama’s agenda items regardless of the fact that the Congress failed to pass it into law. She–and all of the others like her, many Democrats in the Congress included–do not care about constitutional procedure; they only care about making sure their agenda is passed, and it doesn’t matter if the agenda is passed through dictate.
We live in a scary time when we have so many people who are willing to bypass what is supposed to be the people’s branch of the Congress and impose their will upon us. We now live in a country where if the federal government cannot pass laws in the traditional, acceptable, constitutional manner they will simply look to government agencies to force their will upon us.
America's Watchtower 
Well, it’s not only the Dems who are looking beyond the Congress for their solutions – remember how SCOTUS, in overturning portions of McCain-Feingold in the Citizens United case, also overturned over a century of precedent and legislation.
That having been said, though, there’s no doubt that the government has got a tightrope to walk here. The FCC is being urged by many to act to restrict ISPs from instituting two-tier service or other discriminatory practices.
For example, Comcast was caught degrading the signal of its customers who were downloading movies -movies they could be paying Comcast to watch on cable. Currently, there’s little that customers can do to prevent that sort of behavior on the part of their ISPs. Yet there’s the very real possibility that once the government asserts its authority to protect the people from such unscrupulous actions, it’ll have the proverbial foot in the door, and may very well go casting about for other ways to protect the public, including content-related “protection.”
What if, for example, CNN became an ISP and deliberately degraded the signal everytime a customer accessed hannity.com, foxnews, or America’s Watchtower?
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I understand there are some conserns here, actually I am split on the issue of Net Neutrality. That is why I wrote that it was ” one of the more controversial bills in the eyes of many bloggers,’ I was writing more about the process of a government agency implementing something that should be done in the Congress.
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As soon as I saw Waxman, I remembered something that one of our CH contributors, Snarky Basterd, wrote (in his massively snarky style) back in 2009. It can be found here….
http://feedyouradhd.com/silence-the-takeover-continues-bloggers-beware/
Waxman has been big on the censorship thing for a long time now. Having the FCC start to regulate the internet is the nose under the tent. The rest would come later.
If CNN was an ISP, and they degraded what I liked, I would change ISPs. Consumers walk with their wallets. Kinda like how they turn off MSNBC and CNN.
Come to think of it, EXACTLY how they turn off MSNBC and CNN. Also, who in the hell would want CNN as their ISP? No one watches their network.
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I read about this today. They are still looking at the FCC avenue to get this done. If the Republicans take the house and senate this November it will be difficult for the FCC to act because the Congressional Republicans already said they would intervene to stop it. So I would expect some movement by the FCC soon towards Net Neutrality.
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Most likely it will happen before the new Congress, we will have to watch closely.
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Thanks for posting this, Steve. I find it extremely disturbing that some people believe the FCC should step in and implement an agenda, even though it has no constitutional or congressional mandate to do so. This appears just one more way they want to use to manage the information we receive.
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That’s my problem with this, the whole “well Congress couldn’t get it done, so now we will look elsewhere to implement it” mentallity that is creeping into the government and into the minds of many people.
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In many parts of the country, there aren’t so many ISPs that you could consider it a competitive market – indeed, here in Atlanta, there are only two major players with a third trying to establish a foothold, but its service is spotty. Real competition exists when there are at least three reliable players in a market, preferably more.
It’d be similar to the Post Office delivering my copies of the New York Times and the ACLU newsletter on time, but deliberately delaying the delivery of the National Review for a few days.
And changing the channels isn’t “walking with one’s wallet” anyway, because no cost is involved in clicking a remote.
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Just think of all the money we could save by forcing the alphabet agencies back to their original mandates (and even shutting down a lot of them, such as the TVA and National Endowment for the Arts), and de-fanging their ability to write regulation outside the supervision of Congress.
Can you imagine the FCC just basically keeping track of who is on what broadcast wavelength? Or NASA, NOAA, and the EPA getting out of the “saving the planet” business and back to doing space projects, keeping track of the weather, and cleaning up major environment disasters?
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Oh, what a wonderful world it would be!
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