Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told Fox Business that regulating the internet like a utility under Title II of the Communications Act, as President Obama has proposed, would harm innovation: “I talk to those innovators every single day,” she said. “They do not want to have to fool with another federal agency. They do not want additional taxes.”
“The internet’s not broken, it doesn’t need it,” she said.
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Blackburn pointed to the annual Consumer Electronic Show, which is currently taking place in Nevada, and hypothesized that if you asked the innovators there if they wanted to first file with the FCC before presenting their inventions, “The answer would be ‘no.’”
On issues like fast lanes for companies like Netflix, Blackburn argued, “It is called companies finding a way to transact business and not have the federal government mandating how they are going to transact business. Let’s leave it to the private sector.”
“What we don’t want to see is the FCC usurping that authority so that they are assigning priority and value to content.”
Blackburn is on the Energy and Commerce Committee, whose chair, Fred Upton (R-Mich.), has also condemned net neutrality regulation.
The FCC recently announced plans to vote on a yet-undisclosed net neutrality plan in February.
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