A national coalition of more than 200 groups and companies supporting a free Internet organized a flood of calls and emails to senators, which helped win the recent vote. Now that same coalition is attempting to repeat their success in the House. However, many observers point out that even if net neutrality defenders win in the House, it will be extremely difficult to secure a 2/3 vote majority to overcome an expected veto from President Trump. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Candace Clement, campaign director with the media democracy group Free Press. Here, she talks about the recent Senate vote and the effort now underway to pass the same legislation in the House.
CANDACE CLEMENT: We won a huge victory in the Senate this past week and yeah, now this fight moves on to the House where indeed it will definitely be a tough, but the Senate victory was really a great example of how much momentum this issue has. You know, we saw every Democrat in the Senate vote for this. We saw three Republicans cross the aisle to join the Democrats on this. You don’t see a lot of that happening these days in Congress. And that’s really because, you know, members of Congress realize how much this issue matters to their constituents and to their voters, particularly in this election year that we’re in.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Thank you for that, Candace. As I understand it, the repeal of net neutrality rules, those rules take effect June 11. Tell us about the clock that’s ticking on the House of Representatives and what happens if the House fails and Trump fails to sign legislation that reverses the FCC ditching of net neutrality rules.
CANDACE CLEMENT: So you’re absolutely right. The repeal of the rules is set to go in effect on June 11 and you know, the House needs to move on this quickly and you know, they can, they can vote on the (Congressional Review Act) anytime this year. But I think in an election year, we all sort of know what the timeline looks like for, you know, Congress getting things done and in terms of what that impact is going to be on people. You know, I think the tricky thing about how the cable and phone companies will respond to this and start rolling out, you know, net neutrality violations is that it might not be immediately obvious where you know, you go online one day and then, on June 12 suddenly, Comcast lets you know that if you want to access Facebook, you got to pay an extra $15 a month.
I think it might end up being something more sinister. It might take us a long time to figure out what they’re actually doing because there’s not a lot of transparency when it comes to how they conduct their behavior around things like this. So it’s a very important battle in the House. And we’re gonna be doing everything we can and we need everybody out there who cares about the future of the Internet and making sure that it doesn’t turn into cable television to do everything they can to put pressure on members of the House, to make sure that they do the right thing and vote the right way here. And another avenue that exists for us is, Free Press is one of many organizations and companies that are suing the FCC over their decision from last year. We have a track record of success winning in the courts on this issue, but the timeline for that is very much unknown at this point.
BETWEEN THE LINES: We have these giant telecom companies, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon that operate as Internet service providers and have lobbied Congress to get rid of these net neutrality rules. What do we know about their campaign to stop the forward motion of yours and other groups’ efforts to reinstate net neutrality?
CANDACE CLEMENT: You know, something that’s been so funny – I’ve been working on this issue for 10 years now. And to see the way that these cable and phone companies have embraced the term net neutrality over the last couple of years is extremely amusing. So you’ll see these companies issuing statements saying that they’re supportive of net neutrality, that they just want to seek a legislative solution. And by that they mean they want Congress to introduce some sort of new law that would inevitably involve something that looks absolutely nothing like the net neutrality rules we won late last year. Members of Congress do take a lot of money from cable and phone companies and from telecom companies. And so it’s definitely something that we have to push back against and it means that we have to be even louder. We have to call their offices even more frequently. We’ve got to show up at candidate forums and events and talk to them about this issue and make sure that they really know.
And I think that it’s because people have been doing that and doing that so aggressively for the past few years that we were able to win net neutrality rules in the first place and that we were able to achieve such a huge victory in the Senate last week. So you can check out our website, which is freepress.net. There is also another great website that we are a part of and work in partnership with a couple of other organizations. Fight for the Future and Demand Progress in particular, called Battle for the Net, which is BattlefortheNet.com. There’s so many other organizations that are doing great work on this. We’re also a member of the Voices for Internet Freedom Coalition, which is a coalition of organizations that are working to you know, talk about the issues of Internet freedom from the perspective of people of color. So there’s a lot of great stuff out there. Definitely check it out, get involved, and there’s lots of work to be done. So we’d be very excited to have you in the fight.
