[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 156 (Thursday, September 28, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6193-S6195]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                         Nomination of Ajit Pai

  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the President's 
nomination of Ajit Pai to head the Federal Communications Commission.
  My view is that, Mr. Pai will do an enormous amount of damage to one 
of the foundational principles of the internet--net neutrality. I am 
going to outline why that would be a horrendous mistake for our 
country.
  After we came to use the internet and see what an extraordinary asset 
it would be to our country, really beginning in the late 1990s, and 
early 2000s, we laid out what I still consider to be the legal 
foundation for the internet.
  On a bipartisan basis, there was a big effort in the Senate and the 
House to really lay out what were the foundational principles of the 
net, and there were a variety of them. We wanted to make sure that 
folks were not hit with multiple and discriminatory taxes, and that 
they were not taxed on access to the internet. We wrote the digital 
signatures act, which is of enormous benefit to people, for example, in 
the Presiding Officer's home State of Nevada, where they are making 
business transactions. We made a judgment, which some have said has led 
to $1 trillion worth of private wealth for our economy, whereby we said 
that we were not going to expose the small entrepreneur--the person who 
is getting started in the garage--to needless litigation.
  One of those core principles was net neutrality, which, in my view, 
for the reasons that I am going to describe this morning, I think Mr. 
Pai would work long and hard to try to undermine.
  Because so much of the telecommunications debate sounds like a lot of 
complicated lingo, I want to try to describe in something resembling 
English what ``net neutrality'' is. Essentially, ``net neutrality'' 
means that after you have paid your internet access fee, you get to go 
where you want, when you want, and how you want. In a sentence, that is 
what net neutrality is all about, and it is a bedrock principle for 
internet users in the Presiding Officer's home State of Nevada and in 
Oregon and all across the country.
  It locks in equal treatment to accessing the internet.
  We are not going to have some kind of information aristocracy in our 
society whereby the affluent have access to some kind of technological 
treasure trove, and folks who do not have much are kind of stuck with 
what almost resembles dial-up. That is not what we want for 
communications policy in America. We want to give everybody a chance to 
get ahead so that the kids in rural Oregon and rural Nevada have the 
same kind of opportunities as youngsters in Beverly Hills or the Gold 
Coast of Chicago or Palm Beach. We want to make sure everybody has a 
chance to get ahead.
  Mr. Pai says that he is for real net neutrality, and we have tried to 
pin him down on a whole host of policies that really get him to commit 
to the essence of it, but he mostly says a version of what the big 
cable companies say. The big cable companies have

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come to say: We like net neutrality. We are not going to block 
anything. We are for the consumer; we are for the little guy. We just 
do not want a whole lot of government.
  They say that what they really would like is voluntary net 
neutrality.
  Let me tell my colleagues something. There is about as much 
likelihood that the big cable companies will voluntarily subscribe to 
net neutrality as there is the prospect that William Peter Wyden--one 
of my 9-year-old twins, the boy--will voluntarily limit himself to one 
dessert. It is just not going to happen. It is just not going to work. 
Mr. Pai is on the side of the big cable companies. He has a long 
history of putting those companies before the consumers--the big 
corporate players over the small businesses--and pay to play over a 
free and open internet.
  I introduced the first strong net neutrality bill here in the Senate 
in 2006. We all know that back then we were just starting the debate 
about technology policy. The Senate was getting ribbed pretty seriously 
by the late night talk show hosts who said that the internet was a 
series of tubes. So, as I have indicated, what we have tried to do is 
to make sure that if you pay your internet access fee, you get to go 
where you want, when you want, and how you want.
  Net neutrality has been the law of the land, and our economy has 
grown around this leading principle with respect to equal access to 
information and customers. Mr. Pai has said that he wants to take a 
``weed whacker'' to the strong, enforceable net neutrality rules. Right 
away, with his quotes that are on the record, he is talking about 
blowing up this notion of a level playing field, which is so crucial to 
innovation and free speech online and that allows the startups to get 
out of the garage to become the next YouTube and Google and EBay.
  I want to emphasize that point.
  People talk a lot about technology policy.
  To my colleagues, this tech policy debate is about the little guy who 
wants to be able to get his business out of the garage so that he can 
become the next big guy. Net neutrality gives us the opportunity to 
create opportunities for that small entrepreneur, the person who is a 
small entrepreneur with big dreams.
  Net neutrality prevents your internet service provider from favoring 
one type of content over another. As an example, suppose your internet 
provider has a financial stake in a third-party content site. It could 
ensure that content goes to your home faster and clearer than to the 
homes of its competitors if you did not have real net neutrality--
enforceable, real net neutrality, not something like Mr. Pai wants, 
which is, oh, we will kind of pay lipservice to net neutrality but not 
make it enforceable.
  For example, you could have AT&T deciding to provide free data for 
customers streaming HBO, which would cause more folks to subscribe to 
that service over its competitors and starve other creators of the 
subscribers necessary to create new and innovative content. That is the 
kind of thing that happens if we do not have real net neutrality.
  It even holds true for telehealth providers. Telehealth depends on 
reliable, fast, and low-cost internet coverage to transmit critical 
health information, especially in rural and remote areas--for example, 
the remote monitoring of blood glucose levels in diabetes patients. Net 
neutrality prevents the internet service providers from viewing this 
lifesaving service as a cash cow, thus charging rural hospitals and 
community health centers a premium fee to deliver critical and timely 
healthcare services.
  Not long ago, the Federal Communications Commission adopted a strong 
legal framework that would make sure that the Federal Communications 
Commission had the tools to protect the open internet, and the reality 
was that, then, the Federal Communications Commission and a gentleman 
named Mr. Tom Wheeler, who had a background in the industry, used their 
experience in how companies operated and how they treated consumers to 
make sure that we had constructive, real, and concrete consumer 
protections.
  The reason I feel so strongly about Mr. Pai's nomination is that Mr. 
Pai made it clear with his comments about taking a weed whacker to 
anything enforceable. He is going to roll back the rules, and then he 
is going to claim to be fixing a problem that doesn't exist.
  The reality is that we have strong net neutrality protections in 
place right now. If you vote for Mr. Pai, make no mistake about it, you 
are voting to roll back consumer protection. You are voting to take a 
big step backward for the internet. You are going to hurt the people--
the small business people, the startups--who are dreaming in their 
garage of the chance to be big and who are going to have a lot more 
problems if there is a telecommunications policy that doesn't give them 
a fair shake.
  As I indicated, this notion of a voluntary solution to net neutrality 
is absurd. I talked about it in the context of my own son. It would be 
hilarious if I even suggested to my son that I am going to let him, 
William, voluntarily limit himself to one dessert. He would smile and 
wait until I got out of the room, and he would dig in for some more. 
That is going to be the same thing if we embark on a net neutrality 
policy that says: Let's just trust the big cable companies; the cable 
companies, in their heart of hearts, are all about the little guy. They 
are just going to voluntarily go along with net neutrality because they 
are just that kind of good folks who want to make sure that the little 
guy gets ahead. The fact is, Chairman Pai's track record demonstrates 
that he is not in the consumers' corner.
  Last year the Federal Communications Commission acted on the 
responsibility given to it by the Congress to protect browsing history, 
favored applications, and even the location of broadband users from the 
ISP. During that vote, Mr. Pai voted no. He was, again, with cable 
companies' profits over the American consumers' privacy.
  During the August recess, Mr. Pai began an attempt to really backdoor 
a proposal that would lower the acceptable standard speed of internet 
access in rural areas. That is just wrong. Rural areas are already 
facing huge broadband challenges. Last Saturday night, I was in Oak 
Ridge, OR, which has a population of a little over 3,000. Earlier that 
day, I had been to La Pine, OR, in Central Oregon. Right on the top of 
their agenda is trying to find ways to expand opportunities for better 
communications in rural areas and more opportunities for broadband.
  So in the August recess, when communities like Oak Ridge and La Pine 
want more opportunities in rural communities, we had the Chairman of 
the Federal Communications Commission trying to sneak through a 
proposal that would lower the acceptable standard speed of internet 
access to rural America and hurt rural America. Make no mistake about 
it. That would hurt rural America--the Oak Ridges and La Pines. It is 
just wrong. The Congress mandated that the FCC expand access to high-
speed internet to every American, and Mr. Pai basically said: No, 
slower internet speed is good enough.
  As I indicated, just this last weekend, on Saturday night, we had a 
townhall in Oregon. I am telling you what these small communities are 
telling me about their current frustrations with slow and 
unsatisfactory internet speeds. Mr. Pai is giving a big gift to the 
powerful interests, and their internet speeds are going to get slower 
rather than what rural America wants, which is faster internet so that 
they have more opportunities to participate in the global economy and 
more opportunities to help their kids with their homework. Congress and 
the Federal Communications Commission ought to be working for all to 
have access to high-speed internet and not telling folks in rural 
America that what they have is just good enough.
  Mr. Pai has repeatedly failed on another matter, and that is to act 
even in the face of clear danger to the security of America's mobile 
phones. Despite years of warnings about well-known weaknesses in mobile 
phone networks that allow hackers and spies to track Americans' phones, 
intercept calls and messages, and hack the phones themselves, Mr. Pai 
has taken a hands-off attitude. His Federal Communications Commission 
says it is not going to force wireless carriers to fix the weaknesses, 
and--what a surprise--his traditional answer is that ``voluntary 
measures are going to do enough.'' I disagree because they haven't 
worked.

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  We always talk about the role of government. I think this is an area 
that really lends itself to thoughtful discussion because, obviously, 
we don't want government if you can figure out a way to solve a problem 
without it. The voluntary measures have not worked here on these basic 
security issues I have described. The self-regulation approach has 
failed. The Federal Communications Commission has to force the carriers 
to secure their networks and protect America's critical communications 
infrastructure. The failure to act on this security issue means that 
the American people are going to be less safe.
  I close by saying that my view is that net neutrality has sparked the 
flames of innovation and commerce on the internet. Net neutrality has 
been one of the foundational principles that we started working on in 
the late 1990s and in the early part of this century. It was up there 
in terms of importance, like trying to prevent multiple and 
discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce, particularly taxing 
internet access, and the digital signatures law, making sure that you 
couldn't hold somebody personally liable if they were to invest in a 
website or a blog. These were foundational principles that have been of 
enormous benefit to our country, and net neutrality was one of those. I 
guess it would be the fourth in the list of foundational principles 
that we talked about and have been talking about for well over a 
decade.
  We should be building on net neutrality, not walking it back. I 
believe that what Mr. Pai is talking about is a significant retreat 
from the freedom and openness that the internet is all about.
  I urge my colleagues to vote against the confirmation of Mr. Pai. 
Vote in favor of a truly open internet.
  I yield the floor, as I note the Democratic leader is here to speak.