Providing for Congressional Disapproval of A Rule Submitted By the Federal Communications Commission

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. There have been no committee hearings on his proposal, and it is not yet ripe for consideration here on the Senate floor.
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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I thank the Presiding Officer, and I thank all of my colleagues here today. This has been a very important debate to have on the floor of the U.S. Senate. It is a debate over whether we are going to continue to have a free and open internet. This vote is a test of the U.S. Senate, and the American people are watching very closely.

This vote is about small businesses, librarians, schoolteachers, innovators, social advocates, YouTubers, college students, and millions of other Americans who have spoken with one voice to say: Access to the internet is our right, and we will not sit idly by while this administration stomps on that right.

This vote is our moment to show our constituents that the U.S. Senate can break through the partisanship and break past the powerful outside influences to do the right thing--the right thing for our economy, the right thing for our democracy, the right thing for our consumers, and the right thing for our future.

This is common sense to Americans around the country, with the only exception being telecom lobbyists and lawyers inside the beltway. How do I know? Because 86 percent of all Americans in polling agree that net neutrality should stay on the books as the law of the United States.

The public is telling us loudly and clearly to vote for this resolution. They are telling us they don't trust their internet service provider to show up on time for a customer service appointment at their house, so they certainly don't trust them to put consumers ahead of profits.

They are telling us that once they pay their internet bill, they expect fair access to the internet. They are telling us they are sick of the special interests getting their way while the rest of us get the short end of the stick.

So I ask each and every one of my colleagues today to heed the calls of the American people to keep the internet open, to keep the principle of nondiscrimination at the heart of what the internet has been and must continue to be, not just for the most powerful voices but for those who have the smallest voices inside of our society. That includes entrepreneurs who just last year received half of all venture capital in the United States which went to software and internet startups. That is what we need. We need to understand how this incredibly chaotic entrepreneurial system in our country works, and at the heart of it is net neutrality.

Just 2 weeks ago, in Massachusetts, I had a meeting with 500 people on net neutrality. I invited Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web.

Tim Berners-Lee was selected by Time magazine as one of the 20 greatest thinkers, scientists, and innovators of the 20th century. Who else was on the list with him? Sigmund Freud, Edison, Henry Ford.

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the worldwide web, the organizing principle of the web. What he said is, the principles of nondiscrimination are baked into the internet. It was his intent to have it work that way so there could be no discrimination. What we are talking about is a fundamental change. The largest companies now want to implement fundamental change in order for them to ensure that competitors cannot compete as well as they could if they could not be discriminated against--that consumers have the protections they need so they are not harmed, and so this innovation economy can continue to unleash itself for the benefit of the United States, so we are, No. 1, looking over our shoulders at Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the world.

The internet and its success is a story about the United States being No. 1, not any individual company, and certainly not a small handful of broadband companies. That is why the rest of the world envies what we have in our country, this incredible engine of innovation which has created millions of new jobs since the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed, since this digital revolution was unleashed. We must keep these principles intact.

That is what we are debating here today on the floor of the United States Senate. We are debating what the principles should be for this organizing principle of our country for the 21st century, which is the internet. From my perspective, the only way in which every American, every entrepreneur, every new idea is going to have a shot at helping to make our country better is if net neutrality stays on the books.

So this is a defining vote, the most important vote that we are going to have in this generation, on the internet. The whole country is watching. Eighty-six percent of all voters support net neutrality, 82 percent of all Republicans support net neutrality. If it is not broke, don't fix it. It is working, and it works for the smallest voices and for the largest voices. What these huge internet companies, the internet service providers, want to do is change the rules, tilt the playing field.

It was a long route to get to this era. We had one telephone company, one cable company, monopolies going into people's homes. It took a lot to get away from that era so that smaller voices, newer voices could be heard. When that happened, it unleashed trillions of dollars of private-sector investment the software and internet companies, these innovators, were now able to gain access to. They could have done it if the rules made it possible before we changed the laws in the 1990s. But since then, they have--and they have reinvented, not just the United States of America, but they have reinvented the whole world. There is a vocabulary which has been created since 1996, words that now everyone thinks are common: Google, Amazon, E-Bay, Hulu, You Tube. They didn't exist. They didn't have a role in our society. We had to change the rules in order to make it possible for them. There is a whole new generations of companies whose names we do not know yet, but because of net neutrality they will be known. They will be the job creators for the next several decades in our country.

So I thank all Members who participated in this debate. There won't be a more important one that we have, because it goes right to the heart of our identity as a free and open society. I urge my fellow Senators to vote yes on my Congressional Review Act resolution to restore the net neutrality rules to the books.

Mr. President, I yield back the remainder of my time.
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