US Republicans pass an anti net-neutrality bill

THE US House of Representatives voted on Friday to reject the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) rules on net neutrality.

Last year the FCC adopted rules that it said would preserve net neutrality, however on Friday the US House of Representatives, where the Republican party holds a 48 seat majority, voted through a resolution that disapproves the FCC's net neutrality rules. A similar measure has been tabled in the US Senate, however it is expected that the resolution won't even come to a vote in the Senate and that President Obama would veto it if by some chance it was to pass.

The FCC adopted rules that ban network providers from selectively choosing what traffic to route on their networks. Republicans argue that the FCC's rules add government regulation of the Internet.

One group that supports the deregulation of network providers, the Internet Innovation Alliance told The INQUIRER back in 2010 that the Internet service providers could regulate themselves and that external interference was not necessary, essentially saying that the free market would sort out any problems.

The problem is that self-regulation has been shown not to work in the case of financial institutions and it is likely that most people don't believe that the telecom companies are capable of regulating themselves fairly and in the interests of consumers.

Republicans also questioned the FCC's authority to police any net neutrality laws, with Republican Representative Cliff Stearns saying, "The FCC has never had the authority to regulate the Internet". House Republican Leader Eric Cantor heralded the outcome of the vote as "an important step to bring down the FCC's harmful and partisan plan to regulate the Internet". Not that Cantor's view is partisan, of course.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats have completely the opposite view, with Representative Henry Waxman saying the move to disapprove the FCC's rules "would give big phone and cable companies control over what websites Americans can visit, what applications they can run, and what devices they can use".

Another Democrat, Representative Anna Eshoo went even further, launching a stinging attack on Republicans and saying their actions against the FCC were "an ideological assault on a federal agency and its ability to provide basic consumer protections".

The battle of Net Neutrality is essentially between telecoms operators that want to divvy up the network so that they can make even more money than they do now and consumer rights advocates who want to retain an Internet that gives equal rights to all sources of data. The fear is that without net neutrality rules in place the biggest content providers will run roughshod over smaller outfits that can't compete in bidding wars for network capacity and priority.

Despite the Republicans' victory in the House, ultimate power still rests with President Obama who has been a staunch supporter of net neutrality, and Obama will have the final say on whether network providers can preferentially route traffic from the most profitable sources of content and ignore equal access, suppress innovation and trample consumer rights.µ