Comcast is Pushing For a Shitty Net Neutrality Law It Will Write

In the wake of successfully lobbying the FCC to kill net neutrality, Comcast is pushing for a new net neutrality law. Why? As the lawsuits against the FCC for ignoring comment fraud and the public interest looms, ISPs realize full well it's a legal battle they may very well lose. After all, the FCC will need to prove in court that it not only listened to consumer feedback and expert analysis (it didn't), but that the broadband market changed so substantively in the last two years to warrant such a stark reversal of a popular policy (it didn't).

Even if the FCC and its ISP BFFs win that court fight, they still have to find a way to keep future FCCs from simply

The solution? For ISPs, it's to push a new law that they know they'll quite literally write, submitted to a Congress all-but owned courtesy of campaign contributions. Such law will profess to put the long-standing debate over net neutrality debate to an end, but will be filled with so many loopholes as to be effectively useless.

Comcast is perfectly ok if the law bans things they never intended to do (block websites outright, blatant throttling), but such a law won't cover the areas most current net neutrality abuses now occur (usage caps, overage fees, zero rating, interconnection, retrans blackouts of streaming services, etc.). Comcast long ago realized there's a million ways to hide anti-competitive behavior behind a rotating crop of faux-technical justifications (llook how it treated HBO Go on Roku and Sony Playstation).

It's important to understand this when you see top Comcast lobbyist David Cohen saying in a blog post that it's "time for Congress to act and permanently preserve the open internet."

Amusingly, Comcast's Cohen pretends that the millions of dollars it spent to gut privacy and net neutrality protections while suing the government didn't cause this problem.

"Unfortunately, there are others who want to continue engaging in a never ending game of back and forth, creating unnecessary anxiety and contributing to an unneeded level of hysteria," says Cohen. "Some will undoubtedly continue threatening litigation that does nothing to protect consumers or freedom of the Internet. Others will say the FCC is shirking its responsibilities, when the real authority truly lies within Congress."

That's a fairly hysterical attempt by Comcast to place the blame for this chaos on everybody but Comcast . Nobody forced Comcast to lobby and file suit to overturn extremely popular privacy and net neutrality rules. And while Comcast now breathlessly insists a new net neutrality law is the solution to a problem it created, they ignore the fact that if the law is weak kneed and shitty (which is pretty clearly Comcast's intent), it could make the entire situation worse.

Regardless, expect ISP funded lobbyists, think tankers, lawmakers, fauxcademics and consultants to begin breathlessly pushing for a new, loophole-filled law in the new year. They want to get something awful on the booksthe courts realize that the FCC's repeal of net neutrality was rushed, rife with fraud, and in stark contrast to the public interest.