When the FCC announced plans to declare that ISPs are no longer information services, but are instead phone companies, the FCC claimed the authority to regulate content and prices on Internet service nationwide. And no matter how many times the neo-Marxists at Free Press (and their front group Save the Internet) claim that Net Neutrality is all about “preserving an open Internet,” the FCC’s actions are all about command and control.
Even Democrats see the problem, as 72 House members of the Democratic persuasion signed a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski urging him to slow down and let the Congress do its job, instead of taking matters into his own hands and defying the law and the courts to do so.
Update: It’d help if I link the right letter.
Quoth their letter (via The Hill), which is just crushing of Free Press, Google, and other Net Neutrality propagandists:
Like you, we believe in a transparent, data-driven process and stand ready to work with you on measures that will spur adoption and expand the use of broadband networks. But we remain suspicious of conclusions based on slogans rather than substance and of policies that restrict and inhibit the very innovation and growth that we all seek to achieve.
I could hardly say it better myself, seriously. Far be it from me to praise Democrats but on this issue, they’re right. It is up to the Congress to keep the Internet open and innovating, as was done back in the Clinton-Gingrich days when they joined up to pass the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a much-needed update to the Communications act that told the FCC to keep their hands off to begin with.
The FCC is trying to take it upon itself to roll back the 1996 law passed by Republicans and signed by a Democrat, and instead regulate the ISPs the way FDR wanted phone companies regulated back in 1934, all because it gives them more power than the Congress and the President gave them. We’ve got to stop them.