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GOP Concedes to Obama on Net Neutrality
Wednesday, February 25, 2015 06:26 AM
By: Elliot Jager
Republicans, acknowledging that they are — for now — unable to win a grueling fight, are giving way on net neutrality.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to vote Thursday to regulate Internet service as a public good, applying controls similar to the ones it uses on utilities.
Republicans, led by Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, admit that they have no legislative workaround to the Democratic-controlled FCC in the absence of a bipartisan congressional consensus, The New York Times reported.
"We're not going to get a signed bill that doesn't have Democrats' support," Thune said.
Democrats, led by President Barack Obama, and backed by new media firms such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit, favor imposing FCC regulation so that companies that control the broadband world — Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable, for example — can be blocked from charging for faster delivery to transport their content.
The argument in favor of net neutrality is that poorer companies and news outlets that can't afford to pay for fast-lane services will quickly lose impatient customers to those who can.
Opponents of the impending FCC decision say that Internet overregulation will reduce incentives for necessary continued investment to speed up Internet access, and that regulation might further lead to taxation of web services.
Brian Dietz, a spokesman for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, said that the pro-net neutrality camp was able to frame the debate. It took the thorny issue of how to keep the Internet efficient, and made it appear that opponents were against a free Internet.
"Many of the things they have said just belie reality and common sense," Dietz told the Times.
While the FCC's Democratic chairman, Tom Wheeler, is expected to win Thursday's vote, cable companies and Internet service providers can be expected to take the matter to court.
Congress, for now, can do little to reverse the FCC. But down the line, a Republican-leaning commission might do just that, the Times reported.
At this stage, Democratic claims that Internet gatekeepers have to be regulated by the FCC to prevent them from discriminating among competing companies has overwhelmed conservative warnings that "heavy-handed regulation" and potential taxation will stymie the Internet, the Times reported.