Legislative Aide Hints at New Net Neutrality Bill
Nov 14, 2008
Reuters is reporting that Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, plans to introduce network neutrality legislation when the new Congress convenes in January.
The news stems from remarks made yesterday by Sen. Dorgan's telecom counsel Frannie Wellings. Speaking at a conference, Wellings said legislation to mandate net neutrality is "definitely necessary" and expressed optimism that such a bill would be enacted with support from the Obama administration.
President-elect Obama made it clear during his bid for the presidency that he supports net neutrality legislation (though it remains to be seen if the issue will stay atop his or Congress' list of priorities given the ongoing economic crisis).
In September, Comcast announced that it planned to appeal the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) ruling that the cable provider had violated net neutrality principles by improperly blocking peer-to-peer file sharing and BitTorrent traffic. According to Reuters, if the court sides with Comcast [in that case], legislation will become much more likely."
AT&T executive vice president Jim Cicconi hopes the status quo will prevail, maintaining that "the current (FCC) principles already deal with unreasonable discrimination" and regulation is unnecessary.
The debate is also the subject of this Ars Technica article, which looks at Tim Lee's recent Cato Institute paper about preserving an open and neutral network without regulation.
Tags:
Barack Obama, Byron Dorgan, Comcast, Commerce Committee, Congress, FCC, Jim Cicconi, net neutrality, network neutrality
What this article does not mention is that Frannie Wellings, the staffer who announced the introduction of the bill, only recently joined Senator Dorgan's office. Prior to doing so, she was the communications director of an inside-the-Beltway lobbying organization known as Free Press, which has been lobbying heavily for several years for extremely onerous regulation of the Internet. Is Senator Dorgan aware of Ms. Wellings' past activities? Is he aware that the regulation proposed in the bill would harm small, independent, and rural Internet service providers, who serve many of the residents of his extremely rural state? Is it possible that Ms. Wellings is seeking to exploit Senator Dorgan's power and seniority to ram through a bill which would actually do great harm to his constituents?