[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 80 (Wednesday, May 16, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2688-S2689]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Net Neutrality

  Mr. President, on another matter, over the last 20 years, the 
internet has yielded progress that was the stuff of science fiction 
just a generation ago. In so many ways it has spawned a new economy and 
fostered new connections across the country and the world.
  In large part these successes owe to a bipartisan consensus that 
Washington, DC, should be largely hands-off, but, of course, like every 
exciting new frontier of the economy, the internet attracted attention 
from the crowd that prefers to regulate first and ask questions later.
  In 2015 President Obama's FCC set out to fix what wasn't broken. It 
imposed regulations designed for Depression-era telephones on new 
technologies that fit in our pockets. So

[[Page S2689]]

much for the light-touch approach that helped the early internet grow.
  Last year, under the leadership of Chairman Ajit Pai, the FCC sought 
to rectify this mistake and restore the rules that helped the internet 
flourish while still protecting consumers from abuses. The resolution 
Democrats are putting forward today would undo that progress. It would 
reimpose heavy-handed Depression-era rules on the most vibrant, fast-
growing sectors of our economy. It is wrong on the merits. It is also 
the wrong way to go about this process.
  The CRA is useful when it lets elected representatives rein in 
regulatory overreach by unelected bureaucrats, but this resolution 
doesn't seek to rein in overregulation. It seeks to reimpose it. What 
is worse, by using the CRA mechanism, the Democrats seek to make the 
2015 rules permanent going forward. The CRA would handicap this FCC or 
future FCC's ability to revise the rules even if provisions were widely 
seen as necessary.
  There is a better way to proceed. It is called bipartisan 
legislation. Senator Thune has reached out to the Democrats on the 
committee to draft internet ``rules of the road'' for the 21st 
century--a set of rules that would safeguard consumers but still 
prevent regulators from stifling innovation at every turn. Already, 
multiple Democratic colleagues have drawn the same conclusions with 
regards to preemptive overcorrection by the FCC. The senior Senator 
from Florida and the junior Senator from Hawaii, for example, have both 
expressed a desire to collaborate on bipartisan legislation.
  But Democrats have already made clear that the resolution today is 
about the elections in November. They know they will not ultimately be 
successful, but they want to campaign on their desire to add new 
regulations to the internet. This resolution takes us in the wrong 
direction, and we should reject it.