ISPs, GOP Used Health Care Debate to Distract From Privacy Vote

[Stellar]

dslreports

Thursday Jun 01 2017 08:20 EDT

Large broadband providers and the GOP used public concern over the ongoing health care debate as a distraction to help them kill broadband privacy protections back in March, the Washington Post reports. The plan, strategized for months by major broadband providers, involved using the Congressional Review Act to kill the FCC's broadband privacy rules, which were slated to take effect last month.


ISP lobbyists shopped the idea around, and ultimately found buyers in Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Arizona Senator Jeff Flake.
Both are major recipients of Comcast, AT&T and Verizon campaign contributions.

"The (ISP lobbying and policy) groups gave Flake $22,700 in donations, compared with an average $4,510 they gave other senators between January and April," notes the Post. "The groups gave Blackburn $20,500, compared with the $2,045 average donated to other House members in the same time. That is about three times the amount of money Flake and Blackburn received from those groups during the first quarter of last year."

GOP lawmakers found their effort easier because Silicon Valley companies like Google, once considered a champion of consumer causes, also supported killing the protections.

Before the 2016 elections, the 21-year-old Congressional Review Act had been used only once, in 2001. But ISPs knew that the maneuver would allow Congress to kill the consumer protections with a simple majority vote in the House and Senate. And because the public at the time was currently concerned about the possibility of 24 million people losing health coverage, it managed to quickly eek through before the lion's share of the public was even aware.

"Trump and the Republicans are doing so many different things on parallel tracks, the news media and activists can’t follow it all," Trump adviser and former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells the paper. "This is by design."

What exactly we're designing here isn't entirely clear. The rules had broad bipartisan support, and even many Trump supporters urged the President to veto the demolition of the rules (he declined). And many of these same lawmakers have now shifted their focus toward killing net neutrality protections -- again at giant ISP lobbyist behest. Meanwhile few (if any) of these lawmakers want to do much about the core cause of most of these problems: a lack of real broadband competition in most American markets.