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Cruz
Although running a distant second behind Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is still managing to have an influence in the U.S. Senate, where his office is filing a plethora of amendments to various telecommunications bills. Among his top priorities: throwing up roadblocks to keep municipalities from offering broadband to their communities.
Cruz and Sen. Deb Fischer, a fellow Republican from Nebraska, are jointly proposing to attach an amendment to the FCC Process Reform Act that would prohibit the FCC from preempting state laws that limit or prohibit municipal broadband networks. The amendment would “prohibit the FCC from preventing states from implementing laws relating to provision of broadband Internet access service by state and local governments.”
Several Republicans in Congress have been highly critical of public broadband, despite the fact many local governments in their districts are clamoring for better broadband solutions for their residents.
Cruz and other municipal broadband opponents are responding to FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler’s decision to effectively overturn those restrictions in Tennessee and North Carolina. Wheeler is considering expanding preemptions in other states where lawmakers passed bills restricting or prohibiting municipal broadband expansion.
The FCC is currently defending its actions in court.
I would never vote for Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, or any Republican or political candidate that will undermine the FCC’s ability to punish states that bans cities or other communities offering municipal broadband. We need competition to have more choice of ISPs with no data caps. We need Bernie Sanders to win at this point to save the internet.
It’s not that Sen. Cruz is against the expansion of Broadband in growing communities. The issue is that it should be the States decision and not something the Federal Government needs to be involved in. If there is any push back on these types of regulations it is only because Sen. Cruz, and those like him, are trying to limit the size and scope of the Federal Government and they feel that the states should govern themselves and not be told what to do by the Almighty Federal Government.
The FCC is not a federal court. They should not be able to overturn state or local law. This has nothing to do with municipal broadband. It has to do with FCC overreach. I don’t like the idea of state or local governments banning municipal broadband, but the idea of the FCC overturning state or local laws is far worse.
By that logic, the FCC shouldn’t exist, because state and local laws conflict with federal laws by their very nature. As a federal institution they need the oversight to overcome that morass.
If they didn’t have that power, the states would be a patchwork of nonsensical laws like “Nebraskan internet cannot be used between 2pm and 5pm by visiting Wyoming residents.” Unification of standards is the purpose of the FCC, and in a democracy the majority is supposed to decide the standard, not individual states. But we don’t live in a democracy any more, do we?
We never have lived in a Democracy. We live in a Republic. The federal government is supposed to protect individual rights defined in the Bill of Rights. States are self-governing and should have limited interference from the federal government.
Democratic Republic, ostensibly. The entire purpose of the FCC is to define the standards by which entities may and may not conduct electronic communications. That includes states, of course. Rather than restricting rights the FCC enables their participation in a global communications market. Lacking that, the states would have no rights because they would have no economy.
You can argue that states should have limited interference from government, sure. But I think the entire internet should have limited interference from state senators with a oligarchic agenda. Because, you know, an oligarchy isn’t a democracy or a republic.
I would never support anyone who directly or indirectly would want to limit consumer choices for internet. If a municipality can provide faster and cheaper internet to more people, there should not be a state or federal law prohibiting them from doing so. As a consumer with limited choices, I’m all for Tom Wheeler’s FCC to right the wrongs of those states that do so.
It has nothing to do with consumer choice on broadband. It has to do with unelected bureaucrats in the FCC, who are not accountable to congress (the people), overturning state or local laws. That is a job of the co-equal Judicial branch of the government. If the FCC is capable of overturning state and local laws, what prevents the other bureaucracies from doing the same thing?
Wow. On a bad day I wonder if this is a key part of the endgame of the Republican party. They see a minority-majority US coming so they try to stop the spread of broadband into rural areas so that young people leave for the blue states and the old people stay behind watching Fox News on Satellite TV. Nobody moves in because they can’t get broadband, there are no new jobs, so the Republicans are able to milk a few years out of the geographic advantages that help them control Congressional districts and Senate seats. Citizens United could have… Read more »
Well, it’s a really dumb endgame, since the country will just end up like pre-1980s Africa. I’m not sure whether the Republicans have a plan beyond “corruption en masse.”
So much for states rights, huh?