Wyden champions Net Neutrality

T.A. Barnhart

Sen Ron Wyden spoke out on the Senate floor today in defense of his "Internet Nondiscrimination Act," aka the "Net Neutrality" bill.  The communications and cable companies seeking to defeat his bill are taking the usual high road:

Groups like "Hands off the Internet," a front group for some of the big communications lobbies, have offered some eye-popping ads. You look at this recent ad, for example, in which they display a copy of my legislation, the Internet Nondiscrimination Act. The only thing accurate about this ad is the top page of my bill. It's got my name on it. It clearly says, "the Internet Nondiscrimination Act," but just about everything else is dead wrong. What they've done is falsely add up what looks like hundreds if not thousands of pages to my bill.

The bill is actually 15 pages.  But if the "Internet-is-our-money-machine" companies can sell the bill as "regulation," they have a chance to defeat Wyden's bill.  The odd thing is, however, his bill does not regulate; it maintains a status quo that works for consumers, small businesses, students, libraries and basically 95% of the users in this country.

The House version is on the floor tomorrow; call your local Representative or send an email (how appropriate would that be?) and remind them their job is not to make international corporations filthy rich but to support the common good.  Wyden's Senate bill is not yet scheduled for a vote, but Geoff Stuckart, in Wyden's office, says it's possible to be later this month.

Here's the full text of Wyden's brief speech today (I can't find it on C-SPAN; I think it might do better spoken than read).  Send Wyden an email and thank him for defending your access to the Internet.

Update

The Senate will deal with Net Neutrality as part of the "Telecomm Reform Act" which is in Ted Stevens' Commerce Committee, of which Wyden is not a member.  This bill may see action at the end of the month, and the hope is that it will deal affirmatively with net neutrality.  But from what I've read, Stevens gets big bucks from the cable companies, and he does serve his masters well.  And then the Senate bill will go into conference with the House's bill — and you can read what Rep Louise Slaughter has to say on that topic at DailyKos. (Thanks to Geoff Stuckart for clarifying this for me.)

This is an unofficial transcript

Mr. President, in the next day or so in the other body, the House of Representatives, they will begin debating one of the most important communications issues facing our country, and that is the future of the Internet. Since the other body will begin that discussion shortly and we have had debate beginning in the Senate Commerce Committee here in the Senate chaired by Senator Stevens, who worked so cooperatively with Senator Inouye, I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about why I think this issue is so important and what the stakes are for our country.

We all understand what has been so exciting about the Internet. It has been a tremendously democratizing force, ensuring that in every nook and cranny of America opportunities are there for Americans to learn, to be able to tap the opportunities of the free enterprise system, to secure health care, an extraordinary array of opportunities. And the reality is with the Internet, after you have paid your access charge to use the net, you go where you want, when you want free of discrimination because you have paid that one charge, your original access charge.

Unfortunately, today there are huge communications lobbies, consisting particularly of some of the major phone companies and some of the major cable companies, who want to change the way the Internet works today. In effect what they would like to do is make consumers and businesses in our country pay tomorrow for what is free today. What happens today when those small businesses or consumers pay their Internet access charge, they can go wherever they want whenever they want on the Internet without racking up extra charges and without facing discrimination. Unfortunately, these big communications lobbies would like to change that. You see, the reports, for example, in distinguished business publications like the Wall Street Journal. They talk about communications plans, they call them "pay to play," where if, for example, you were going to go to a variety of web sites, under some of the approaches, apparently you'd have to pay every time you went to one of these web sites if you wanted to get good-quality service. I don't think that's right. I think that's discrimination. I think it's discriminating against consumers. I think it's discriminating against small businesses, and I think it will do extraordinary damage to the inherent beauty of the Internet, which is that it's been all about a fair shake for every American, for every consumer.

In an effort to spin this discrimination by the big cable companies and the big phone companies against the consumer, the big lobbies are engaged in a huge advertising blitz. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, these big lobbies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertisements to convince the American people that discrimination and these extra charges that they would face on the Internet are actually good for them. If it's so good for the consumer, why are these lobbies spending millions of dollars on these advertisements to tell the American people about? If discrimination was so good, wouldn't consumers have been interested in paying higher prices a long time ago?

It's hard to open the pages of a newspaper or turn on the television without seeing an advertisement urging people to stop Congress from -- quote -- "regulating the Internet." One trade association has even placed ads at airports around Washington, D.C., hoping Senators and Representatives travelling back to their states will see these ads. The executives at these large corporations would not be committing such large sums to advertising if they didn't think that these kinds of advertisements would pay off handsomely in profits. Groups like "Hands off the Internet," a front group for some of the big communications lobbies, have offered some eye-popping ads. You look at this recent ad, for example, in which they display a copy of my legislation, the Internet Nondiscrimination Act. The only thing accurate about this ad is the top page of my bill. It's got my name on it. It clearly says, "the Internet Nondiscrimination Act," but just about everything else is dead wrong. What they've done is falsely add up what looks like hundreds if not thousands of pages to my bill. This is how they demonstrate what my legislation is all about.

Here is the reality, Mr. President. Here is what they say I've proposed. Here's what the big communications lobbies ought to describe as the real world, a piece of legislation that is 15-pages long. The bill that I have introduced is 15 pages. It doesn't look like anything along the lines of what the big communications lobbies are spending such vast sums on. There's an even more disturbing misrepresentation in this ad. It says, stamped up at the top, "regulation." My legislation isn't about regulation. All I want to do is leave the Internet alone. I don't want it to be subject to discriminatory changes, changes that would hit the American consumer in the pocket. I think any fair-minded American who looks at my record will see that I've never sought to regulate the Internet. On the contrary, when I came to the United States Senate, I was a leader in the effort to keep the Internet free of discriminatory taxes. I fought to keep the Internet free of regulation. Now I'm trying to keep control of the Internet in the hands of the American people and not force Americans in this country to pay tomorrow for what is free today.

If you looked at these advertisements, Mr. President, you would think that neutrality is some new-fangled idea that threatens the Internet. The fact of the matter is, that's what we have today, and the Internet has thrived precisely because it's neutral. It's thrived because consumers and not some huge phone company or some huge cable company get to choose what they want to see and how quickly they get to see it. I want to make it clear that those of us that are fighting to keep the net neutral, which means that when you go to your browser, you go where you want, when you want after you pay that initial access charge. We're not interested in regulating anything. The people who want to make the changes, they're the ones who want to meddle. They want to put their hands on the Internet to heap all these extra charges on the American people.

Now we have a small business in Oregon, one with a web site where she sells her products to people all over the world. If these big lobbies have their way, she'll have to pay a new hefty fee so customers can continue to have the same access to her web site. That's not right. The consumer, after they pay that initial access charge, ought to be able to go where they want when they want, and to make them pay tomorrow for what they get for free today after they pay that initial access charge is wrong. As this debate goes forward, and I think colleagues are waiting to speak, I had anticipated spending a bit more time on it, but I think this ad says it all, Mr. President. We ought to keep the Internet free of discrimination. We ought to protect consumers against multiple and discriminatory excess charges, and the next time somebody sees one of these ads, ads that seem to have millions of dollars of lobby money backing them up, they ought to know that this, which purports to represent my legislation, is false. What's in this ad suggests scores and scores of pages. The reality is my bill to keep the Internet free of discrimination, to protect the consumer, is 15 pages long, and the argument at the top of the ad that there will be a host of net neutrality regulations is similarly false. It's not about regulating anything. I want to keep the Internet the way it is.  It is an open, vibrant system accessible to all. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

By T.A. Barnhart June 08, 2006