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U.S. house passes net neutrality bill but leaves the devil in the details and its fate to the senate
By Steve Blum
Tellus Venture Associates
April 16, 2019 — Santa Cruz, CA
A network neutrality bill cleared the democrat-controlled U.S. house of representatives yesterday and is on its way to the U.S. senate, where republican leader Mitch McConnell has been widely quoted as saying it’s “dead on arrival”. The vote in the house was “mostly along party lines”, with only republican – Bill Posey (R – Florida) – joining democrats, according to The Hill.
The text of the bill hasn’t been posted yet. The first draft simply reinstated the Obama-era net neutrality rules and blocked the Federal Communications Commission from making any changes. A later amendment gave smaller Internet service providers – those with fewer than 100,000 customers – an extra year to comply with some of the terms.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which tracked the action yesterday, more changes were made on the house floor, which were mostly benign but…
One amendment does give us pause, though. The last amendment to the bill (McAdams), affirms a bit from the old Open Internet Order, saying that the net neutrality prohibition on blocking doesn’t prevent ISPs from blocking “illegal” content, a distinction that includes copyrighted material…A broad reading of this amendment could easily have greenlit Comcast’s throttling of Bit Torrent, which led to a past FCC sanctioning the cable company for violating net neutrality…
As ISPs and media companies become even more intertwined, it’s easy to imagine this loophole being exploited. However, legislative debate..made clear that this amendment did not give an ISP the right to censor content solely because the ISP thought the content was unlawful.
It’ll take more than one renegade republican in the senate to prove McConnell wrong. But it’s happened before. Shorty before the current FCC rules took effect last year, three republican jumped ship and voted for a resolution of disapproval. It could have reversed the FCC’s decision, but didn’t go anywhere in the then-republican majority house.
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This article was originally published here: https://www.tellusventure.com/blog/u-s-house-passes-net-neutrality-bill-but-leaves-the-devil-in-the-details-and-its-fate-to-the-senate/
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Tagged Steve Blum, Tellus Venture Associates
