If looks like the Republicans in U.S. Congress are set on not letting the FCC enforcing Net Neutrality rules, as a House subcommittee on Communications and Technology approved a measure (15-8) which tosses out the FCC Net Neutrality rules.
According to the Wall Street Journal, House Republicans have also proposed cutting off the purse strings to the FCC so it can’t enforce the Net Neutrality rules.
If you don’t know, Net Neutrality means that a service provider cannot discriminate against content because it’s not in its economic interest. Comcast, for example, can’t make videos of its NBC content look better and run faster than videos from a competing site under proposed FCC rules.
The FCC Net Neutrality rules are still in place until the Congress or President Obama decides to do something but we could be facing a future where the governmental agency has to re-tool these rules or not have them at all.
The easy reason for this is that big-name providers like Comcast and mobile providers like AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon don’t like these FCC Net Neutrality rules and these companies donate millions and millions of dollars to Congress.
The FCC Net Neutrality rules don’t really impact the mobile providers, as most (in the industry and government) believe that this is too nascent of a market to have strong regulation put in place. The fear for mobile operators is that the strict rules will eventually find its way to the mobile space.
There’s also the philosophical argument that the private sector knows what’s best and that the innovation will be hampered with these stringent rules.
It’s such an odd move in my eyes, as these rules were not very strict in the first place and would likely have not stood up in the first court challenge. When you look at all the problems this government is facing, you would think that the FCC Net Neutrality rules would be a super low priority.
[Via The Wall Street Journal]