Providing for Consideration of H.R. Res. 37, Disapproving FCC Internet and Broadband Regulations

Floor Speech

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Mr. POLIS. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, this is indeed a simple bill, one page long. Nevertheless, it is a terrible bill, one page long, and I would like to tell you why.

Today with our economy only beginning to recover, I believe that this rule and the underlying bill will imperil one of the greatest sources of job creation and innovation in America: the Internet. Now over the past 15 years, the Internet has created more than 3 million jobs, according to a study by Hamilton Consultants. More than 600,000 Americans have part- or full-time businesses on eBay alone. And on average, new Internet firms have 3 million jobs.

Yet, the majority brings to the floor legislation that will harm the open Internet. I can speak to this with some degree of authority. Before I came to Congress, I created over 300 jobs myself through founding several Internet-related companies, including ProFlowers.com and BlueMountain.com. My first Internet company was an Internet service provider on the other end of this equation, so I have good experience from both the e-commerce side, as well as the access side which I bring to this debate. I have long supported open access to the Internet and continue to support net neutrality.

Let me bring this close to home. When I was starting a flower company, ProFlowers.com, back in the late 1990s, we offered a supply-chain solution. We brought fresher flowers to people at a better price by disintermediating the supply chain and allowing consumers to buy flowers directly from growers. Now, we were up against several legacy companies, companies like FTD and 1-800-FLOWERS, that had a different distribution model that we believed and argued in the marketplace was a less efficient distribution model.

Now, had there not been a de facto net neutrality at that point, it would be very difficult for a new company to break in, because you would have had the incumbent leaders in the marketplace buying the access through the broadband connections, much as companies will pay slotting fees to get into grocery stores, some book publishers pay fees to be out on the open table. The big difference is that we have robust competition between grocery stores, robust competition between booksellers.

With regard to broadband access, over 70 percent of the residents of this country live in areas with only one or two broadband providers. All of the dynamism--and I have not heard this disputed even by the chairman of the subcommittee who testified before us yesterday--really, the dynamism and the job growth from the Internet comes from the content and applications side. Now, if there aren't legitimate economic considerations on the bandwidth side, clearly those who are providing both wireless and wire bandwidth need to have a return on investment calculus, but it is that very same dynamism around the content-driven Internet that drives the usage that then leads people to pay more for higher speed access to the Internet.

Now, the FCC has done an exemplary job with these rules, and they have actually received buy-in from all of the major players with regard to this matter: content providers, content aggregators, search engines. And, yes, even on the broadband access side, most of the major broadband providers have supported these regulations as well. So they have done an excellent job.

I realize that what they first put out there, many people were concerned with. And they then did their job, as they were told to by congressional statute, specifically, which authorized them to do this. They listened to all parties, and they revised their net neutrality regulations so they are something that I think we can all be proud of as Americans, and we can all be proud of as users of the Internet.

Now, just to be clear how they hit their mark, because I know yesterday the chairman of the subcommittee mentioned that he thought that some of the broadband providers were coerced into supporting the protocol standards before the FCC. I don't know enough to dispute that or not. But what I will tell you is that I have impartial third-party testimony that I think is very compelling from investment bankers who follow this sector. And the way the investment banking sector works is they have analysts who really cover different stocks, cover different sectors, and they inform people about the impact of market regulations on that sector.

What I have from the Bank of America and Merrill Lynch analysts, it says: "The agreement"--the FCC's net neutrality provisions--"is consistent with our view that the net neutrality regulatory overhang has been eliminated from telecom and cable stocks."

Now, let me elaborate. What that means, "net neutrality regulatory overhang," is there was fear among the analysts covering the telecom and cable sectors that the Obama administration would do something overarching with regard to net neutrality. There was fear based on some of the initial rules proposed. However, the FCC did their job and that fear has been eliminated. There is now no market overhang on companies in this sector, and they are no longer concerned that the regulations are overarching.

Let me go to the Goldman Sachs analyst from December of last year: The rules stuck largely to what was expected and will be viewed as a light touch.

Let me go to Raymond James: We are glad that the staff is making this innocuous by simply placing official rules around what is already being done by the industry under a no-regulation scenario.

So again, all these rules do is essentially preserve the status quo. Why is that important? Absent this, there would be a major shift in power on the Internet to the broadband providers from the content providers. The Internet historically--again, a wonderful innovation for mankind--allows anybody with a great idea to link up a server in their garage, and their product, their service, their content is available to everybody across the world, the very same as a major corporation that spends $100 million launching a Web site, and they compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Now, some people ask: Has there ever been an instance where a provider has used tiered access or censored anything? And there are a number of instances. An example, in 2005, Madison River Communications blocked voiceover IP on its DSL network. That was eventually settled with the FCC.

In 2006, Cingular blocked PayPal after contracting with another online payment service. This is a perfect example of why we need competition on the provider side. The consumers would have access to presumably a less-efficient payment service that they would not select given their own prerogative because it is locked in through some sort of slotting fee or other arrangement, sometimes vertical integration itself under the same capital structure, as an access provider.

So this rule is actually critical to continue to operate a free and open Internet. That is why the FCC moved forward, with explicit permission from Congress in the form of their statutory authority, with rules to address this issue. Their open process included input and got vast buy-in from all major parties, including Internet service providers.

Now, there are many on the left that wish that the rule went further. And, yes, there might be some in business that prefer that there were no rules at all. The vast majority of the business community strongly supports the consensus rules that the FCC came out with.

Of those commenting on the proposed rule before the FCC, well over 90 percent supported the Commission's effort, and over 130 organizations support the proposed rule and oppose this legislation, including groups like the American Library Association, the Free Press, League of Latin American Citizens, Communications Workers of America, and the vast majority of Internet-related companies.

I also want to emphasize that there has been a number of faith-based groups that have weighed in. One of the largest is the Conference of Catholic Bishops, representing millions of American Catholics, who weighed in in a letter opposing this legislation before us today: "The Internet is open to any speaker, commercial or noncommercial, whether or not the speech is connected financially to the company providing Internet access or whether it is popular or prophetic." The letter goes on to state how the Catholics have used the Internet as an outreach tool.

Now, there is legitimate fear here from two perspectives:

One, among the nonprofit and religious community in general, is that their content would receive a lower tier because they are not necessarily able to pay the same type of slotting fees or access that a for-profit commercial provider would do. So your Web page from Nike might load faster than your Web page from the Catholic Church because, if there was tiered access, who would be more likely to pay for the speed of the access.

The other fear, also legitimate, is of political or religious censorship of the Internet.

You could have a provider who would say, You know what? I like Obama, so I'm going to block access to tea party sites or slow them down through our broadband access.

Now, again, in a market with complete dynamism and where there was a lot of competition and where every American could choose broadband providers, that would be less problematic. But what we have is a situation where over 70 percent of Americans only have one or two choices for broadband access. There has historically been broad support from both sides of the aisle for the "no blocking" rule, which simply states that broadband providers cannot block lawful content. It is the equivalent of telling the Postal Service they can deliver or not deliver your mail based on whether they agree or disagree with the content. The carriers--the Internet, itself--is one cohesive entity, and what a wonderful entity for mankind, the fact that you can plug in and have access to a wide breadth of information on the Internet.

I also want to refute the argument that there is no nor should there be any government regulation of the Internet. I, actually, have several pages listed here of government regulation of the Internet, including things like regulating child pornography, including, of course, the complex set of protocols around intellectual property and intellectual property enforcement to ensure that the Internet is not used as a medium to steal or to illegally profit from the creative works of others. We go on and on with regard to e-commerce, advertising, privacy laws--a number of laws designed to protect our privacy, to protect us from abuse, and to protect us from security breaches with regard to viruses.

This is another dimension. This is to protect us from the Internet being broken apart by a series of tiered pipelines rather than one cohesive Internet. The absence of any net neutrality regime would empower selective parts of corporate America to censor the Internet in the same way that Communist China censors the Internet. If you search for Tiananmen and you're in Mainland China, you will get pictures of happy people. You will not get pictures of their crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrators.

We risk the same potential here. The broadband actors play a critical role, and I want to make sure their concerns are balanced and that they will get their return on investment. We actually have a quote from the AT&T executive, who did appear before the committee, who said that they can use the 10- to 15-year time frame to justify a return on investments with regard to broadband infrastructure. Even Comcast has called the new rules a workable balance between the needs of the marketplace and the certainty that carefully crafted and limited rules can provide to ensure that Internet freedom and openness are preserved.

I would further argue that a free and open Internet is in the interest of the broadband providers, themselves. So not only is it not necessarily the case that they only agreed to these under duress, I think many of the forward-looking broadband providers realize that what drives Internet access and what drives consumers to want a faster, better connection is that very vibrancy in the information marketplace that net neutrality helps preserve.

So the real question is: Why are we here? Why are we here debating something that was thoughtful, that has buy-in from all sides of the debate?

I really had a tough time figuring it out even through our committee examination of this yesterday. But I think that we're here because of a knee-jerk reaction of the opposition that might have been initially opposed to some of the more overarching rules that were initially proposed before the FCC, but we've come a long way since then. This feared takeover of the Internet didn't occur. Overarching rules didn't occur. Most of the broadband providers now support the direction of the FCC. Yet, under the legislation that we will consider today, the open Internet rule and the repeal of it will provide more uncertainty to investors. They will again not know what's going to occur. The investment bankers will, once again, say there was uncertainty and overhang, hurting the valuation of the very broadband stocks that the majority is claiming to do this for the benefit of. Market analyses have found that the new open Internet rule removed the regulatory overhang--it's a light touch--which throws a monkey wrench into the market mechanisms at a critical time for our recovery and job creation.

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Mr. POLIS. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

It's hard to know where to begin in refuting the arguments of my good friend from Tennessee.

There were several comparisons that I view as simply out of hand. One of them that was given was that this is somehow some sort of Fairness Doctrine for the Internet, that this is somehow some sort of government involvement with the Internet. Quite the contrary is true.

I want to be clear. I was an original cosponsor last session of the bill that proactively would have prevented the administration from moving forward with the Fairness Doctrine. I oppose the Fairness Doctrine. I believe in a dynamic marketplace of ideas. The FCC's rulemaking around net neutrality moved forward and fostered that very dynamic marketplace of ideas that the Fairness Doctrine is contrary to.

If we do not have some sort of net neutrality regime in place, there will be a selective censorship of the Internet, and we risk the Internet deteriorating into a series of tiered structures, whether they are tiered economically or ideologically. The great human accomplishment that is the one common Internet will simply cease to exist as such. It is, in fact, the proponents of net neutrality and the regulatory regime proposed by the FCC after receiving input from all stakeholders that will preserve the Internet as it is.

I would agree with my friend from Tennessee's argument. She said 80 percent of people are happy with their access. I hope it's even higher.

Mrs. BLACKBURN. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. POLIS. I yield to the gentlewoman from Tennessee.

Mrs. BLACKBURN. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Any time you allow the Federal Government to step in to a process where they have not been involved in a process--and we did this not once but twice. We did it not once but twice.

Mr. POLIS. Reclaiming my time, I would like to engage in a colloquy with the gentlelady.

With regards to the Postal Service, would the gentlelady oppose an effort to say that the Postal Service can, perhaps, decide which mail to deliver, maybe based on which political candidates their unions support? Would the gentleLady say that that would be okay for the Postal Service to do that?

Mrs. BLACKBURN. The gentleman knows that that is not relevant to the discussion that we are having here.

Mr. POLIS. Is the gentlelady going to answer?

Mrs. BLACKBURN. What we are talking about is that the application of this is the Fairness Doctrine of the Internet.

Mr. POLIS. Reclaiming my time, the Fairness Doctrine is something that I oppose, I will always oppose, and it is completely consistent. The Fairness Doctrine is consistent with the approach that the gentlelady is approaching with regard to the Internet. By having net neutrality in place, we prevent any type of fairness doctrine or selective allowance of certain content to consumers of the Internet. The whole net neutrality regulatory structure is to ensure that everybody has access to putting content on the Internet in the same way, and that that content will not be discriminated against based on its ideology, based on economic considerations.

Mrs. BLACKBURN. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. POLIS. I yield to the gentlelady from Tennessee.

Mrs. BLACKBURN. We all know that anytime you give the government the ability to assign priority and value to content, you have inserted them into the decision-making process. They would precede the responsibility of the Internet service providers. And the gentleman knows there has been no market failure.

Mr. POLIS. Reclaiming my time, the absence of a net neutrality regime would be the government deliberately conveying value as gatekeepers to the broadband providers and allowing them to decide, based on religious or ideological or economic--or whatever criteria that they want--what kind of Internet they intend to serve up to their users.

I would like to add that, under the legislation we consider today, that this open Internet rule will add the very certainty to investors and companies that we need and predictability in our marketplace that allows companies to continue to grow and invest in job growth.

It strikes a balance, and it solves a real issue. Some on the other side will say, oh, this could be an issue in the future, but it hasn't arisen. Well, the rules that we are talking about do enshrine in place the very Internet, the dynamism, the fruitful discussion between different ideologies that the gentlelady from Tennessee said that she aspires to preserve. And we have already reached a point where ISPs have blocked, as a matter of fact, voice-over-IP services. And they have blocked peer-to-peer traffic, they have blocked PayPal in favor of other financial transaction companies that might have economic relationships with them.

I believe strongly in Internet, in Internet as an achievement for mankind, in Internet that net neutrality will help preserve for our generation and the next.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. WOODALL. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to another gentleman from the committee, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Terry).

Mr. TERRY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in favor of this rule to block the FCC from regulating the Internet.

I thought the exchange between the gentleman from Colorado and the good lady from Tennessee was very telling because right now the marketplace controls the Internet. It is free--I call it wild, wild--in its applications.

Now, what the government is trying to do now, in the words of Ed Markey during our hearing on this, was, "We need to regulate the Internet to keep it unregulated." I don't get that, but it is kind of the thought from the left side of the aisle that you have to regulate it in order to prevent anything that they may disagree with.

So what we have here is an instance where now the freedoms of the Internet and the marketplace that are driving it now have to be under a regulatory scheme decided by a group of appointees of the President; not to be free, it has to be built in relation to their image. Listen to his words, it's going to be built on their image.

The analogy of Communist China regulating the content can't happen today. They talk about blocking, that these ISPs will stop us from going to our Web sites. There have been a handful of those situations; and every time, the public marketplace chastises them openly. There were a few times the FCC even called up and said, hey, you can't do that under the principles that were adopted.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.

Mr. WOODALL. I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.

Mr. TERRY. And so those were resolved by, yes, a little bit of involvement, but the marketplace.

Now the comparison to Communist China here from the gentleman is appropriate when you look at how this measure was implemented. The President campaigned on net neutrality. Congress would not authorize it because Congress as a whole bipartisanly disagreed with net neutrality, giving a regulatory bureaucratic agency control over the Internet versus free market.

So since Congress wouldn't pass it, sua sponte they just rose up and said we don't have the authority--well, they didn't say they don't have the authority, but Congress never gave them the authority to regulate the Internet, so they're just assuming that they're going to take that power away from the people and the marketplace and do it themselves. That is where the analogy to Communist China is appropriate.

Mr. POLIS. I would argue that, in Communist China, the residents there do not have access to the Internet. What they have access to is an Internet minus, and Internet minus are sites that their government deems inappropriate. We risk going down that same route if we don't enshrine, in rule or in law, net neutrality provisions that ensure that there is an open and free Internet and that American citizens have access to the Internet in its entirety, not with being sensitive because of economic or religious reasons.

One of the simple components of this rule is the no-blocking rule. This states very specifically, a broadband provider cannot block lawful content. A provider cannot say, I don't like Catholics; I'm not going to allow Catholic content through our broadband. A provider cannot say on my Internet we are blocking access to Tiananmen because I have business deals in China. We need to ensure that the Internet, as one entity, is available to all Americans who buy access.

And again, the broadband providers themselves, out of their own economic self-interests, endorse this concept because they truly understand, with the fiduciary responsibility of their own shareholders, that the very dynamism that leads to the increase in popularity of the Internet relies on it being an open and free Internet. And without these protections that are afforded by the FCC's open Internet rules, the abuses that have already occurred are just a small sign of far worse things that will come.

In expressing support for killing the open Internet rule with this bill, a witness for the majority brought to Capitol Hill said that ISPs should be allowed to block lawful content and said, "It is appropriate because you block the source of the problem. If the person that is violating your acceptable use policy is Netflix, you block Netflix." In effect, you would empower broadband providers to bully around content providers--be it Netflix, be it Yahoo--and say, you know what? I don't like the fact that you are renting this movie; I don't like the fact that you are linking to this news. That's the direction that Communist China has gone, and that is the direction that America and the global Internet will go if we fail to preserve the net neutrality regime that is before us.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. POLIS. The gentleman from Oregon mentioned KosherNet and other sites that might want to provide proprietary content. I want to be clear that this rulemaking and rulemaking process has nothing to do with proprietary networks. It refers to the Internet.

I hold several patents with regard to Internet technologies. In those, as is common among Internet patents, we describe the Internet as an open-ended gateway network. To the extent that there are thriving proprietary networks, be they religiously affiliated or commercial, the FCC is not talking about those with regard to this matter.

Mr. WALDEN. Will the gentleman yield on that point? Because I don't believe that was the case.

Mr. POLIS. I will be happy to enter into a colloquy with you on your time.

An article from yesterday's StarTribune says, "Court rejects suit over Net-neutrality rules." This happened yesterday. A Federal appeals court rejected a lawsuit by Verizon and MetroPCS to challenge the Federal Government's communications rules, the FCC's communications rules.

Now, what I want to point out is, like many newspaper sites, this was a decision between me and the newspaper site, an economic decision about how I would get access. Now, some newspapers want to charge for access, others don't. I was happy the Minneapolis StarTribune allowed me access because I wasn't about to pay.

How do they pay for it? They have a couple ads in here. Apparently, Bill Maher is going to be at Mystic Lake Hotel and Casino, coming up. I won't be there, but maybe most of the folks who read the Minneapolis StarTribune would consider that.

And then there's something called License to Thrill, also at Mystic Lake Casino and Hotel. Now, I assume they found that many of the viewers of the Minneapolis StarTribune might be interested in Mystic Lake. And again, it was their decision, the Minneapolis StarTribune's decision, Do we sell for access?

By the way, The New York Times, I think, is starting to charge for access. I'm going to have to decide whether I'm going to have to try to just make do with their free portion or somehow loop in an online subscription. I do pay for The Wall Street Journal online. It's worth every penny. It's a good publication. But it's hard to strike that balance.

What you are doing--what this body is considering by not having a net-neutrality regime in place is to add another party to this contract between me and the StarTribune. And you know what? It is not good enough, Jared Polis and the StarTribune, that they're letting you access and you have to pay. There's also the provider. And you know what? You could have the provider say, You know what? We're not going to serve up these ads. We're going to serve up our own ads. You know what? We're not going give you access to the StarTribune unless you buy our newspaper plus service for an extra $14.95 a month.

You're changing the value chain in a way that is unprecedented and conveying enormous value because you're putting them in charge of the whole Internet of the providers and the bandwidth and the pipelines. Yes, they are important to have and, yes, they need to have a return on investment and, yes, they support the FCC rules as a fair way to do that. Yes, given their druthers, would they rather have a reach and control of the Internet? Sure. They'd rather control all the ad space on every newspaper and every other Web site. But they know that's a reach. There's no serious market valuation that's given by investors or investment analysts to that reach scenario that would threaten and kill the very Internet itself by interspersing a third party on my private agreement with the Minneapolis StarTribune. That's why we need to have a free and open Internet for all to ensure that there's not another party that comes in and steals the intellectual property and the usage of others and conveys it to their own advantage. And that's exactly what the very reasonable FCC rules put into rule.

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

First with regard to the 1099 closing, I think again we can applaud this as a step forward for small business. Many of us wish that there could have been a different way of paying for it, and I did support it twice in the last session of Congress. While there are major winners, and small businesses are, and we needed to close the 1099 loophole, and I am glad we did, the losers under this are American families making about $80,000, $85,000 a year, who will be stuck with a large Republican tax increase.

Mr. Speaker, with regard to net neutrality, it is indeed a brave new world that we face on the Internet. And I have been an Internet user since the early 1990s. As I mentioned, my first company was an Internet service provider. So I have experience on that front. It is the very dynamism of the Internet itself that brings its value to humanity and to Americans. That is why it is important to protect under net neutrality and open Internet provisions.

Another critical provision that has generally had support from across the aisle in prior sessions has been a transparency requirement that would require broadband providers to inform consumers about how or whether they are tiering access. Part of the issue has been we only find out about these things after the fact, after a very technical analysis, and accusations are made and have to be discovered. We would like to know. And one of the reasons I oppose this rule is Ms. Matsui offered an amendment that would have increased consumer confidence and led to greater investment in broadband infrastructure by supporting a simple transparency requirement with regard to this matter.

Net neutrality keeps the Internet free and open. It is that simple. Just as the postal service can't discriminate in delivering legal content, so too the Internet should not discriminate in delivering legal content. Proprietary networks can work their will. And the gentleman from Oregon mentioned Koshernet or people, users, that might only want certain access on their machines. They are empowered to do that under open Internet regulations.

They can have programs on their local machine that can say, you know what--many parents do this--they want to have parental controls or block certain sites. They can only have certain sites that are accessible and block down all other sites. Many people, they are empowered to do this not by their provider, no. They are empowered to do this by choosing the software and the service that they use to be able to restrict the Internet for themselves or for a minor that lives in their home.

These decisions should not be made by large multinational corporations deciding which Internet you have your own access to. Seventy percent of American families only choose between one or two broadband providers. For them to have access to the Internet, not the Internet minus like they have in China, not the Internet minus that too many Americans could face if we don't encode open Internet regulations into rule or law, if we want to retain that access we need to make sure that the value of the Internet and the dynamism that is created by the content and application providers have unfettered access to consumers in America and across the world.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. POLIS. The net-neutrality rules are consistent with the D.C. circuit ruling in Comcast v. FCC and, in fact, that advances the congressional mandates. The rule fulfills the FCC's mandate from Congress and their mandate to encourage broadband deployment by supporting innovation and investment among their other duties.

And, in fact, last year Congress had a chance to advance legislation in the area around protecting Internet freedom, and that legislation was supported by many public interest organizations, high-tech companies and, yes, many broadband carriers. That would have put in statute a set of net neutrality rules and that would have definitively, through statute, removed the threat of title II classification. Unfortunately, that legislation was blocked by Republicans in the House.

So, again, I think when Mr. Walden mentioned that there were some folks on the broadband side that might have been coerced into supporting something, fearing that there would be a threat of title II reclassification, it was the activities of Republicans that specifically prevented the removal of that title II reclassification threat. And, again, I would like to point to remarks by many investment bankers that it has not been seen as any serious regulatory overhang with regard to the valuation of stocks in that area because there is no effort to move forward with title II regulation.

Obviously, with regard to this matter, if it's creating, somehow, this much controversy around what should be noncontroversial rules enshrined into place the current free and open Internet policies that have seldom been violated, but we fear might be violated more in the future, if that's provoking this kind of discussion, even though all the major stakeholders discuss it, you can imagine what type of discussion would ensue if there was a serious effort to reclassify under title II.

Mr. Stearns also mentioned that maybe the committee will begin work on what type of statutes we might have. Certainly, specifically, I am curious. I asked Mr. Walden as well yesterday if the committee would consider no-blocking rules, would the committee consider transparency requirements, do they think that they, in fact, could do a better job than the FCC and that this body, with its vast knowledge of the Internet and DNS architecture, would do a better job than the FCC.

I think, you know, one of the clear things that I would like to see and I think this body would like to see, and why I oppose this rule, is if we are talking about repealing the FCC's rules, what is the work product of this body? What is the replace? It's repeal and replace.

I think there has been some acknowledgment. In fact, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Stearns) mentioned that the committee might work on some of these areas. What is that proposed body of work? Why are we not looking at repeal and replace and what we are replacing it with. Is it going to be similar to former Chairman Waxman's net neutrality bill of last year? Are there substantial changes that have--buy-in across the aisle?

Can we do better? Frankly, I'm skeptical. But if the gentleman would like to advance the work product of his committee and come forward with a clear decision between what we would be replacing it with, I would be certainly open to seeing if, in fact, the work product of the committee is better than the work product of the FCC with regard to this matter.

Mr. Speaker, the Internet has been of immense value to mankind, to America, to me personally and to all of us personally. It's contributed to our culture, our economic advancement, to the flow of free ideas.

We should not trade the freedom of the Internet, the freedom of the Internet has been an open, superhighway for a toll road controlled by and for Internet service providers alone. There is a balance to be struck, and the process of finding that balance is under way by thoughtful people in an open and inclusive process.

Today's action by the Republicans short circuits that process and imposes simplistic, highly ideological solutions on what is actually a complex issue that has shared ideals for preserving a free Internet, free of government involvement. We can find bipartisan consensus.

The FCC order came close to striking that correct balance, far closer than the status quo. That's why it's supported by Internet service providers themselves, consumers groups, the high-tech community, content providers, and faith-based organizations.

We must keep the Internet free by allowing the FCC to move forward with the open Internet role, and we should be debating this on an H.R. bill under an open rule. I encourage my colleagues to support the open Internet by opposing the previous question and this rule.

I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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