House Committee Rejects Transparency and the Rights of Internet Users

WASHINGTON — On Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the deceptively named “Small Business Broadband Deployment Act.”

The legislation modifies the Federal Communications Commission’s February 2015 Net Neutrality order, exempting all but the largest Internet access providers from that decision’s enhanced transparency rules. The FCC created a temporary exemption from these requirements for ISPs with 100,000 subscribers or less. The committee voted today to exempt companies with as many as 250,000 broadband customers. The exemption will last five years.

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

“The bill purports to save small ISPs from allegedly burdensome costs that no one has been able to quantify or specify. In reality it denies users of these small- to medium-sized providers the right to more information about the actual performance of their broadband connections.

“The bill is a giveaway to ISPs claiming that it’s a burden to comply with the Open Internet Order’s sensible obligation to provide useful information to their own customers. Exempting providers with up to 250,000 customers exempts every single provider other than a couple dozen of the nation’s largest cable and phone companies.

“We’ve seen this story before: Broadband providers insist the sky is falling and that the simplest safeguards will prevent them from deploying, even as they continue reporting record revenues, profits and investment levels in the wake of the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband as a telecom service.

“Committee members claim that this bill will help save ISPs in Rep. Greg Walden’s Eastern Oregon congressional district and other rural areas. But the real question is why members of Congress are so focused on saving hundred-million-dollar companies from overblown and imaginary burdens while stripping their constituents of the right to important information about their broadband service.”