House Democrats refuse to weaken net neutrality bill, defeat GOP amendments

House Commerce Committee voted to reverse Ajit Pai's net neutrality repeal.

JON BRODKIN - 4/4/2019, 2:37 PM

Democrats in the US House of Representatives yesterday rejected Republican attempts to weaken a bill that would restore net neutrality rules.

The House Commerce Committee yesterday approved the "Save the Internet Act" in a 30-22 party-line vote, potentially setting up a vote of the full House next week. The bill is short and simple—it would fully reinstate the rules implemented by the Federal Communications Commission under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler in 2015, reversing the repeal led by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in 2017.

Commerce Committee Republicans repeatedly introduced amendments that would weaken the bill but were consistently rebuffed by the committee's Democratic majority. "The Democrats beat back more than a dozen attempts from Republicans to gut the bill with amendments throughout the bill's markup that lasted 9.5 hours," The Hill reported yesterday.

Republican amendments would have weakened the bill by doing the following:

•Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules.
•Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules.
•Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the US that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps.
•Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program.
•Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices.
•Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy.

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