John McCain Introduces Legislation to Prevent Net Neutrality Rules
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Related subjects: Legislation, Media, Net Neutrality, Press Freedom, Rights & Freedoms, U.S. Economy, U.S. Law, U.S. Politics, Webb Tisch Comments Off
John McCain, the Arizona Republican who ran against Barack Obama in last year’s presidential election, today introduced in the Senate the “Internet Freedom Act”, in a brazen bid to make the internet far less free for the average web surfer. The bill would bar the FCC from enacting regulations that would prevent internet service providers from interfering with users’ preferred content choices, penalizing small content producers and slowing the internet down broadly in order to collect fees for higher-speed services, which the providers would select.
The concept of net neutrality is not new; in fact, McCain introduced his bill on the same day as the FCC actually moved forward on a plan to establish net neutrality in the United States. McCain argues that net neutrality regulations will hamper “innovation” in the internet services marketplace and therefore slow job creation. But a vast and very impassioned movement, both among businesses and users, has fought long and hard for net neutrality regulations, because without them, the free press in the United States may literally disappear.
Major ISPs have sought to persuade policy-makers that they should be able to technically manage and interfere with specific travel routes for specific data online, privileging services that pay them for access to a wider audience and marginalizing anyone who does not. McCain is making the specific pitch the ISPs have used repeatedly in their arguments that they should be allowed to seize control of the Internet —which they did not build— in order to better control users’ browsing habits.
McCain’s proposed legislation, while posing as a defense of “internet freedom” may actually be a legal assault on the First Amendment, which mandates that:
Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble [...]
That specific prohibition on Congressional interference in the “press” is being turned on its head by Sen. McCain. He alleges the ISPs are entitled to total “freedom” to control and manipulate the information that others create and which paying customers are seeking to access. McCain confuses the paper-mill for the writer or editor who actually takes the risk of speaking truth to power or expressing an untested view.
McCain’s bill would be a very deliberate attempt by Congress to abridge the freedom of the American citizenry to speak freely in the public square, to produce or to access the press they personally seek and/or to “assemble” in online communities, should those communities not pay the fees ISPs would demand for better quality connectivity.
If the bill McCain is proposing passes the Congress and becomes law, it would be the end of the Internet as we know it, because it would remove any effective obstacle to major connectivity providers using their networks to select among users’ content choices, leading to a kind of profit-based censorship of online content. Content creators, the journalists, media outlets and network and website designers of today, would find themselves severely restricted in their ability to employ the Internet’s resources freely.
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