Marsha Blackburn (R, AT&T) Wants Fast Lanes 'Like TSA Pre-Check'
"As we've noted, you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a lawmaker more cozy with AT&T and Comcast than Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn. Blackburn played a starring role in helping industry giants kill net neutrality and broadband privacy protections, and has also supported letting ISPs write terrible state legislation banning citizens from owning or operating their own broadband networks. Not surprisingly, Blackburn's trailing badly in the polls as she tries to jump from the House to take Bob Corker's vacant seat in the Senate.
This week, Blackburn participated in a GOP stage play hearing in Congress designed by ISPs to soften opposition to the idea of paid prioritization, or letting deep-pocketed companies buy a competitive advantage from incumbent ISPs.
Under this scenario, companies could pay to have better latency and network priority, putting companies and organizations (from startups to nonprofits) at a notable disadvantage. While this has traditionally been considered a terrible, anti-competitive idea and blocked by most net neutrality rules, Blackburn tried to suggest the idea should be allowed by likening it to TSA Pre-Check:
quote:
Many of you sitting in this room right now paid a line-sitter to get priority access to this hearing. In fact, it is commonplace for the government itself to offer priority access to services. If you have ever used Priority Mail, you know this to be the case. And what about TSA Precheck? It just might have saved you time as you traveled here today. If you define paid prioritization as simply the act of paying to get your own content in front of the consumer faster, prioritized ads or sponsored content are the basis of many business models online, as many of our members pointed out at the Facebook hearing last week.
Suggesting the TSA is a good model for anybody is amusing in and of itself, but Blackburn's still simply misrepresenting what ISPs are looking for. They want to be able to charge each company an additional toll for special treatment. And while that might be nice for the companies that can afford it, Blackburn just tap dances over the negative impact that will have on the smaller businesses that can't afford to pay the same toll.
Lured by another revenue stream, ISPs like Comcast have been slowly walking back from past promises to avoid paid prioritization. To try and sell the public on the bad idea, they've been trying to claim that the FCC's net neutrality rules banned all prioritization, hampering innovative services. But that's never been true: the rules simply banned anti-competitive paid prioritization, and for good reason: they give wealthier companies an unfair advantage.
Worried that the FCC could lose the court battle over its repeal, and nervous about the growing array of state level net neutrality rules, ISPs and loyal footsoldiers like Blackburn have been trying to pass a fake net neutrality law: a bill that looks good on the service, but is so loophole-filled as to be useless. It's real goal: pre-empt tougher state or federal rules that actually accomplish something.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Marsha-Blackburn-R-ATT-Wants-Fast-Lanes-Like-TSA-PreCheck-141673
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