Thune Urges FCC & Congressional Action To 'Resolve The Dispute Over Net Neutrality Once And For All'

Mr thune thank you Mr chairman um I continue to believe and thank you all for being here uh to the best way to provide long-term protections for the unit is for Congress to pass bipartisan legislation when I served as chairman of this committee I put forward legislative principles and a draft Bill to begin the conversation and I stand ready and willing today to work toward finding a lasting legislative solution that will resolve the dispute over net neutrality once and for all my question is for each of you that as Commissioners do you each believe the FCC should come to Congress from more Direction before attempting any iteration of net neutrality rules yes or no uh yes senator Ms Gomez well Senator I certainly would encourage uh the Senate to adopt legislation to address this issue once and for all at the same time I do believe that broadband internet access service is too Central to our lives to our education to working to rural Health Care um not to have oversight so I look forward to working with you and hope that maybe I can help if confirmed uh with your efforts at legislation well we would like to work on that um and uh but I have to say it really I to my view it needs to be the role of Congress and uh and I will send Mr Stark you want to go ahead and answer that question yes my answer is no I I absolutely agree that I would love to work with you love to work with Congress I do think additional legislation here would be very sound policy for American people but the FCC does have the the authorization the jurisdiction that we need to move forward is there since the fcc's 2017 order repeal what I think were very heavy-handed Title II regulations what sort of activities have isps engage in that the FCC would need Title II Authority for what specific harms have you seen uh you know I think regardless of specific harms I think um you know as uh as somebody who've used part of the regulator's job is to make sure that we have the proper guard rails to protect consumers um and I would view obviously the need for uh net neutrality rules as part of that um as part of that theory yeah hopefully put together by Congress uh commissioner Carr the when the FCC was considering the restoring internet Freedom order Title II Advocates made a number of claims that the internet would As We Know It uh would end as we know it and isps would charge consumers different amounts to access different Services than isps would block or slow down certain content online unless consumers paid exorbitant fees even Senate Democrats sent a tweet warning that Americans would be getting the internet one word at a time did any of these things happen uh Senator no we have not seen that in fact if you look at Mobile Wireless feeds on average in the five years since that decision they have increased 456 percent I think ultimately covid was probably the greatest stress test for communications policy and as the ranking member indicated uh during covid-19 as traffic surged globally uh Europeans Regulators asked their streamers to degrade the quality of their service because they were worried that the continents networks would break while here we had massive investment that helped to carry all that traffic and if the FCC reclassified Broadband under Title II once again what effect would such a change have on smaller Broadband providers like those in my home state of South Dakota some of which you just met with recently so I think it would really uh constitute a regulatory Onslaught and and increase cost and that the interesting thing I think about net neutrality is that there is a tremendous amount of Common Ground here on principles the challenge is if the FCC does it and goes through Title II Title II is an entire regime that is sort of ill fitted here in fact even the last FCC for bore from something like 700 provisions of Title II which I sort of think is is evidence that it's just not fit for this type of uh of a technology okay thank you shifting gears for just a minute the previous FCC led by chairman Pai provided critical relief from state and local obstacles that increase costs and delayed deployment of 5G small cells eliminating burdensome regulations have been critical for America's leadership in 5G and in the aftermath of the previous fcc's reforms the number of cell sites in the U.S increased by 35 percent between 2016 and 2021 after increasing only one percent between 2013 and 2016. I'd like to see more done on this front we can't afford to make Rural America wait any longer to see the benefits of broadband for two more years because of paperwork commissioner Carr uh let me quickly what are the ways the FCC could expand upon the previous fcc's reforms and then for Mr Starks and Ms Gomez would you commit to preserving the previous fcc's reforms standing upon them during your tenure there's a lot we could do Center including taking some of those reforms that we applied in the small cell context shot clocks that type of ideas and moving that into the wired context I think that's one thing that we should be looking at sharks yes from my perspective um you know making sure that we are able to accelerate in particularly with the amount of broadband that we have coming Wireless that we have coming um I think is extremely important and and some of the rules that we did have preserve I think make good sense yeah let's Gomez uh thank you Senator um I agree that getting deployment out as fast as possible to areas like uh your home state is important and that we should take whatever actions we can also understanding that the needs of localities as well to do their own processes and I look forward to working with you and I look forward to working with Commissioners Karen Starks on that if confirmed well commissioner Starks his uh brother and sister-in-law in Sioux Falls probably have pretty good coverage but there are a lot of areas of South Dakota that don't so yes they do Senator thank you all very much

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Length: 5min 59sec (359 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023