House Energy & Commerce Committee Democrats took to FacebookWednesday to lend their support to the internet day of advocacy and the goal of retaining Title II authority over internet access service.
The FCC under Republican Ajit Pai is proposing to roll back Title II.
Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), ranking member of the Communications Subcommittee, hosted a series of interviews with fellow Democrats—Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, Jerry McNerney of California—as well as pro-Title II activist Craig Aaron of Public Knowledge.
Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said that it is an existential issue for his rural state and that without strong net neutrality rules the ISP gatekeepers will impose monopoly pricing.
Sounding a bit like a noncommercial TV pledge drive host, Doyle called on his Facebook audience (there were over 600 of them) to help drive 10 million comments to the FCC in favor of Title II-based rules, which Doyle said were not broken and didn't need fixing.
Currently the FCC network neutrality docket numbers over 6.2 million comments and over a million in the past 30 days.
Aaron branded as bogus the argument that Title II has depressed investment and said that ISPs routinely tell Wall Street it isn’t a problem while telling Washington policymakers something else entirely.
Schakowsky likened the paid prioritization that current FCC rules prohibit to allowing lanes on the highway that you pay for to go faster, though that sounded a lot like the 'hot lanes' that lead from suburban Virginia to the Dulles internet corridor outside Washington.
