Enlarge / Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. (credit: Getty Images | Win McNamee)
US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is a guest opinion writer for Ars today, arguing that the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules should remain in place. While Republican lawmakers have proposed overturning or changing the rules, Schumer writes that Congress should codify the full rules into statute to prevent the FCC from throwing them out. We’ve also published a counterpoint by US Sen. John Thune (R-SD), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my father owned a small pest-control business. If his competitor down the street had received preferred electricity service, he would have been rightly outraged—and the law would have protected him from that unfair treatment. We don’t reserve certain highways for a single trucking company, and we don’t limit phone service to hand-picked stores.
In today’s economy, it is equally important that access to the backbone of twenty-first century infrastructure, the Internet, be similarly unfettered. That is why it is critical that we maintain the net neutrality protections and clear oversight authority that the Federal Communications Commission put in place in 2015 through the Open Internet Order.
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