Large ISP & Silicon Valley CEOs Were Too Afraid To Publicly Testify On Net Neutrality

from the own-your-words dept

While ISP lobbyists are pushing the government to kill net neutrality protections, they're also pushing hard for a new net neutrality law. Why? With our current historically-dysfunctional and cash-compromised Congress, large ISPs like AT&T and Comcast know that their lawyers and lobbyists will be the ones writing the law -- if it gets passed at all. The end result will be a law ISPs will profess "puts the debate to bed," but which contains so many loopholes as to be effectively meaningless when it comes to protecting consumers and competition.

As a cornerstone of this new push, lawmakers in July sent out invitations to CEOs of major tech companies and major ISPs for a September hearing to be held in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The meeting was, the invitation claimed, an opportunity for stakeholders (only apparently the wealthiest ones) to "rethink the current regulatory model and build new rules from the ground up" in Congress. Again, this is something ISPs have been lobbying for knowing it either won't happen, or if it does will be so loophole-filled as to be worse than useless.

Amusingly, however, none of the invited CEOs from telecoms or Silicon Valley's biggest, wealthiest companies were interested in testifying publicly at the hearing:

"Republican lawmakers had hoped to bring top executives from tech companies and internet providers to testify publicly in a bid to garner support for a deal to set permanent rules on the future of internet access after a more than decade-long fight. No company had publicly committed to testify and many firms were privately reluctant to testify."

The reason for this should be fairly obvious. Large ISPs are perfectly happy to lie about their assault on popular consumer protections in viciously-misleading videos or disengenuous blog posts penned by a rotating crop of lawyers and lobbyists. But no CEO wants to directly own their company's ugly, anti-consumer, anti-innovation, and anti-competitive positions personally in a public hearing, especially given the shady behavior at the FCC and the growing bipartisan public backlash to what Trump's FCC is doing.

Similarly, Google and Facebook don't want to highlight that they stopped supporting net neutrality in any meaningful fashion years ago, and in many parts of the world have repeatedly undermined the concept solely to corner developing nation ad revenues. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings doesn't want to have to explain why the company's support of net neutrality has waned proportionally to the company's growing power, and no major Silicon Valley CEO wants to own the fact their apathy on this subject has left small and mid-sized companies, startups and consumers alone and under-funded as they fight to keep the internet a relatively level playing field.

But worry not! Lawmakers like Greg Walden were quick to make it clear that instead of publicly and transparently owning their inconsistent to downright anti-consumer positions, these large companies will continue to haggle out the details of a new law behind closed doors:

"Zach Hunter, a spokesman for the committee’s chairman, U.S. Representative Greg Walden of Oregon, said the hearing was postponed because of talks over the future rules. “As negotiations progress on a permanent solution for net neutrality that ensures a free and open internet, the committee will postpone the original hearing in order to allow talks between stakeholders to continue,” he said."

So as the FCC works to kill the rules currently on the books, the nation's largest companies and cash-compromised lawmakers will be debating -- without your input -- how to replace these rules with the policy equivalent of wet cardboard. Throughout the fall you're going to see countless ISP-prompted editorials popping up (like this one and this one and this one and this one...) insisting such a law is the best -- or only -- path forward. Be sure to note how these calls ignore what the public wants -- and that the easiest path forward isn't another new law, but to simply leave the existing, popular net neutrality protections alone.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: broadband, congress, net neutrality, testify