Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006

COMMUNICATIONS OPPORTUNITY, PROMOTION, AND ENHANCEMENT ACT OF 2006 -- (House of Representatives - June 08, 2006)

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Ms. ZOE LOFGREN of California. Mr. Chairman, until August of last year, broadband Internet providers were considered common carriers under the law, with a legal requirement to carry all traffic equally.

A series of FCC decisions and the Supreme Court's decision to them changed all that, turning broadband services into unregulated ``information services.''

Why is this important? In my district in Silicon Valley, everybody uses the Internet and knows that you have to have net neutrality. They cannot believe that we would even consider changing that rule.

So what does ``common carrier'' mean? For those of you who don't use the Internet a lot, common carrier is a concept that is quite old. What it really means in exchange for rights to use public ways: you agree to carry all passengers on the same terms. If you get on the bus, a common carrier, you are charged a fee; but the bus company cannot charge more to women than it can to men, and that is really the equivalent of what we are talking about here.

The phone company consolidations have meant that most Americans have one or at most two choices for their broadband service provider. What that means is that we are going to have a duopoly or a monopoly unless we have net neutrality rules that will stifle the Internet. It will turn the Internet into the equivalent of cable TV. That is not going to be good for innovation.

Google is a multi-billion dollar corporation that was founded in a dorm room by two Stanford students. They had an opportunity to be successful because they were not screened out at the very beginning by incumbents who paid for access. That is about to change unless this House adopts net neutrality rules.

Some of the phone companies have suggested that there is a free ride. What they have failed to point out is that the phone companies are paid an enormous amount of money, just like the bus company is, for use of their services. What the net neutrality rules say is you cannot differentiate.

I would just like to say we want to go on seeing the girl in the funny hat making lemonade. Don't make us watch Robin Williams's cousin making bacon juice instead.

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Ms. ZOE LOFGREN of California. Mr. Chairman, I would just like to point out that the Smith amendment does absolutely nothing. The amendment is to the Communications Act, not to the Clayton or Sherman antitrust acts; and whether or not we past this amendment, the current antitrust laws will continue to operate as before.

The savings clause neither creates new net neutrality protections nor takes them away. It is superfluous, it is nothing, and it is meant to encourage Members who actually are for net neutrality into thinking they can somehow get away with being for net neutrality but doing nothing.

The Trinko case contained a similar antitrust savings clause. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Trinko case basically held there were no antitrust remedies for anticompetitive conduct in areas regulated by the Telecommunications Act.

The whole issue is how the antitrust laws apply. I would point out that our committee, the Committee on the Judiciary, reported out by a vote of 20-13 a bill introduced by Chairman Sensenbrenner and the ranking member, Mr. Conyers, that actually did provide antitrust remedies for these Internet provisions. Inexplicably, the real bill, the real amendment that the chairman of the committee and the ranking member crafted and that won a majority of support, bipartisan I would add, on the committee to be reported out, was not made in order for us to discuss today. Instead, this phony amendment was made in order.

I would like to say something else about this rhetoric about regulation. Antitrust law is not regulation. It sets the standard for what monopolies cannot do. It is not a regulatory approach. It is a set of laws that keep monopolies from squeezing the little guys, which is what is going to happen if we do not get real net neutrality in this bill.

The Markey amendment was put in order. We can vote for that, and I hope it passes. If it does not, we will end up with the dualopolies or the monopolies turning the Internet into a kind of cable television outfit.

When the public finds out what we are doing to their Internet, the dome is going to collapse with the uproar they create. For Members who have been here a long time and remember the vote that they took that allowed cable TV rates to go through the roof, that uproar is going to be nothing compared to what you hear if this measure goes forward.

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