Democrats Hope To Gotcha The GOP With Doomed New Net Neutrality Bill

As we've long noted, the Trump era attack on net neutrality was one of the more grotesque examples of regulatory capture and corruption in Internet policy history.

The rules, which imposed some very modest restrictions on giant telecom monopolies to prevent them from abusing market power, were very popular among consumers of all political stripes. And the Trump FCC's repeal involved using a lot of outright lies and even fake and dead people to reduce the oversight of extremely unpopular telecom monopolies.

Despite the Democrats controlling the FCC for more than a year and a half, they still haven't done anything about it.

It inexplicably took the Biden administration nine months to even nominate a third Democratic Commissioner (Gigi Sohn). The telecom lobby then successfully crippled Sohn's nomination (and therefore the agency) with the help of the GOP and key Democrats, intentionally leaving it gridlocked and incapable of passing anything of controversial note.

Hoping to break this logjam, Senators Edward Markey and Ron Wyden are poised to introduce a new net neutrality bill according to the Washington Post. The two-page bill would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service and open companies like AT&T and Verizon up to stricter oversight by the FCC. From what I hear, the bill could drop before the August recess.

To be clear, putting FCC authority and net neutrality into law is a good idea. The repeal was hugely unpopular corruption-fueled gamesmanship, and having a functioning telecom regulator in a country dominated by monopolies is a good idea, despite what the cult of the telecom industry linked free market Libertarian think tank would like you to believe.

Unfortunately, the bill has little real chance of passing in a corrupt Congress. A Congress in which the entirety of the GOP and several key Democratic Senators (Manchin, Sinema) routinely and dutifully prioritize telecom monopoly revenues over market health or consumer welfare. So why try this now? Somebody told the Post the hope is to shame Republicans into owning their policy inconsistencies:

Some net neutrality advocates also think Republican calls to designate social media companies as common carriers could make their positions more untenable, the person said.

You'll recall that numerous Republicans claimed that the FCC lacked the authority to tell telecom monopolies what to do on net neutrality (it did). Those very same Republicans then pivoted on a dime several years later to try and claim the FCC had the authority to regulate social media (it didn't).

The pivot was motivated by the GOP's desire to dismantle Section 230 and force big tech" to carry GOP political propaganda, cornerstones of modern GOP influence in the face of a sagging electorate. This was always about protecting their ability to soak the public in propaganda, at times hidden under performances like a phony, uncharacteristic interest in antitrust reform."

The underlying justification for this pivot was absolute gibberish. While there was ample pretense to the contrary, there was never any legal or logical coherent consistency to any of it. It was self-serving, incoherent hypocrisy. It was basically a fake Hollywood western town, but in policy form.

The GOP opposed FCC oversight of telecom because they wanted to protect AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon revenues. They supported FCC oversight of social media because they wanted to punish big tech" for belatedly, sloppily, reining in hate speech and GOP party propaganda online. There was layer upon layer of bullshit used to obfuscate these two, basic self-serving truths.

I don't know what the response to this kind of corrupt bullshit is, beyond organizing block-by-block to unseat lawmakers that routinely show they don't actually care about consumers or healthy markets. I guess proposing a bill you know won't pass might help highlight the hypocrisy? But the press and public are so tuned out on the net neutrality debate in the big tech" era - I'm not sure it will even register in the summer news cycle.

So it likely won't get much attention. It doesn't have the votes. And Let's propose a bill that has zero chance of passing a grotesquely corrupt Congress, because this will somehow shame the shameless GOP into owning their hypocrisy" is a weird gambit Democrats really enjoy spending calories on, despite minimal returns.