[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 197 (Tuesday, December 10, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6911-S6912]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Net Neutrality

  Madam President, on net neutrality, this Saturday marks the second 
anniversary of the FCC's party-line decision to repeal the net 
neutrality rules. To restore the safeguards of a free and open net that 
those rules protected, today my colleagues Senators Markey, Cantwell, 
and Wyden will ask the Senate's consent to pass the Save the Internet 
Act, which codifies net neutrality in a similar manner to last year's 
Congressional Review Act, which passed the Senate with strong 
bipartisan support.
  I thank those Senators and so many others for their leadership on 
this important and sometimes overlooked issue. Net neutrality is based 
on a very simple idea, that the internet, just like our phones, our 
highways, our power sources, is a public good that all Americans should 
have access to without discrimination, whether you are a big company or 
a startup, a rural school or an individual consumer just like water 
companies can't discriminate if they come to their customers and say, 
oh, I am going to charge you $10 for a day's use of water, but I am 
going to charge your neighbor down the street $100. That would be 
unfair. We would not allow it. The same thing should be true with the 
internet.
  Under the Obama administration, net neutrality rules prevented 
moneyed groups from getting preferential treatment. We should return to 
it. The administration has, unfortunately, sided with big special 
interests and repealed it. Senator Markey's legislation would restore 
the rules of the world that protect a free and open internet.
  I thank my colleagues for bringing this to the Senate's attention 
today.

[[Page S6912]]

  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority whip.
  Mr. THUNE. Madam President, it should come as no surprise that I 
might have a different point of view than the Democrat leader when it 
comes to the issue of net neutrality. If you look at what has happened 
since the FCC ruled on this, there were all these terrible apocalyptic 
predictions that were made about how speeds were going to slow down, 
the internet was going to slow to a crawl, and you wouldn't be able to 
do basic applications anymore, none of which have happened.
  Obviously, we all believe--I certainly do, and I think most of my 
colleagues on this side believe--that if you want to have an open and 
free internet, that is a good thing, and if there are concerns about 
blocking or throttling or slowing speeds in some way, the Congress 
should be heard from on that because what we have had now for several 
years is this ping-pong effect. When one party is in power, they change 
the rules to suit their desires, and then the other party comes to 
power and changes it. Then you have all this litigation that goes on in 
the courts, which doesn't help anybody. All that does is bog things 
down and generates a tremendous amount of cost, and nobody's interests 
are served by that.
  So if there is a concern, and I have articulated this on many 
occasions to my colleagues on the other side, to work with us on a 
legislative solution where Congress can step in and put clear rules of 
the road in place when it comes to the internet--making sure we have an 
open and free internet--we are prepared to do that, but that is not 
something the Democrats have been interested in doing.
  They would rather have this heavy hand of government that slows this 
innovation down, all these wonderful things that are happening in our 
economy right now--the race to 5G, which obviously is critically 
important to so many sectors of our economy--could be dramatically 
impeded if you had the heavy hand of government, the heavy hand of 
regulation, which has been advocated by our colleagues on the 
Democratic side for some time, if that became the norm.
  When President Trump was elected, and Chairman Pai was made Chairman 
of the FCC, and we had a Republican FCC which did away with the 
heavyhanded regulations of the previous administration, we heard all 
these apocalyptic predictions coming from the Democrats about all of 
the horrible things that were going to happen to the internet. I can 
tell you that my experience, I think, is like most Americans. I can 
continue to download applications. I can continue to scroll and to see 
the things I want to see and to toggle back and forth between different 
websites in a way that I did before. It just flat hasn't happened. So 
they are trying to come up with a solution for a problem that does not 
exist.
  That said, we would be happy to work with them. We want to put clear 
rules of the road in place, but that is not what they want. They want 
the heavy hand of government and the heavy hand of regulation 
strangling what has been one of the most remarkable economic miracles 
of the last half century, if you look at what the internet has done in 
terms of productivity in this country.