House Appropriations Committee Renews Attacks on Internet Users with Harmful Riders in Spending Bill

WASHINGTON — On Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee passed the 2017 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill. The legislation includes numerous harmful policy riders, including three measures that significantly restrict the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to enforce the agency’s Open Internet Order. These riders accomplish that by suspending the rules until all legal challenges to them are resolved and by hampering the agency’s ability to investigate and prevent abuses.

Similar anti-Net Neutrality and anti-internet provisions passed through House and Senate appropriations committees last year, but open-internet champions in both chambers negotiated their removal from the final spending bills. This year’s spending bill also includes provisions attacking the FCC’s media-ownership rules and the agency’s efforts to let people buy their own cable set-top boxes.

Since the FCC passed Net Neutrality protections in February 2015, hundreds of thousands of supporters from across the country have urged Congress to reject these kinds of riders, and to let the FCC protect internet users from blocking, discrimination and other abusive practices by broadband internet access providers.

Rep. Nita Lowey offered an amendment to strip from the bill approximately 30 dangerous riders, including the anti-Net Neutrality provisions. Rep. Jose Serrano offered an amendment focused on removing just the Net Neutrality riders. Both amendments failed on party-line votes.

Free Press Action Fund Policy Director Matt Wood made the following statement:

“Yet again we see the same Republicans ignoring the widespread public support for Net Neutrality rules and pro-competition policies, even though these rules are supported by Republican and Democratic voters alike. These poison pill anti-Net Neutrality riders proved too controversial to make it into the final budget deal last year. But these representatives keep trying to undermine common-sense safeguards for the open internet.  

“Today featured more of the same from a handful of elected officials who are doing the bidding of industry lobbyists dead-set on reversing the FCC’s Net Neutrality order. The representatives voting for these measures care more about protecting cable companies than their own constituents. But the public won’t stand for any scheme to sneak these attacks into spending bills and legislate away internet freedoms.

“Open internet champions like Representative Jose Serrano and Representative Nita Lowey should be applauded for working to strip these riders out every time they pop up. Republicans in Congress should abandon their repeated assaults on the open internet. They should stop trying to chip away at the FCC’s authority to protect the public and start working to ensure that everyone has affordable access to an open and fast internet. That’s a goal that everyone needs to get behind.”