We’re Not Giving Up On Internet Freedom

by Phil Kerpen, Contributing Author: One year ago today, my voice and yours and hundreds of thousands of others were ignored when the FCC – on a bare 3-2 party-line vote – adopted President Obama’s plan to reduce the Internet to a regulated public utility under the Communications Act of 1934.Since then billions of dollars of investment and tens of thousands of jobs have been lost. And there are still thousands of complaints pending at the FCC, with action on any of them having the potential to curtail our ability to use the Internet freely.

It’s not all bad news. We helped mobilize millions of letters in to Congress to stop Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet, and had strong language included in both the House and Senate appropriations bills before that process collapsed. Those efforts will be renewed this year. We successfully made the Internet Tax Freedom Act permanent, preventing a 12% tax hike that otherwise would have been triggered by what the FCC did. And litigation is proceeding apace in the DC Circuit, where there is a real possibility the plan will be struck down as illegal. And there are new legislative efforts in Congress we’re excited to support, and we’ll be launching new petition efforts next week so watch for that.

But today I want to reflect. One year ago today, I congratulated Bob McChesney, the Marxist college professor who started the whole net neutrality movement as a way to undermine the capitalist system. And I vowed to fight:

You won this round -- but understand this: you’ve also awakened a sleeping giant. Millions of ordinary Americans who think the free-market Internet has been a wonderful thing. Who understand freedom as the absence of government interference, not the active “designing and managing” by bureaucrats.

We are going to fight. We already won the most recent comment-period, sending your activist ally embedded at the FCC, Gigi Sohn, into an embarrassing “recount.”

Now we are going to fight back in Congress, demanding legislators do their job and overturn this FCC public utility order.

We are going to fight back in the public sphere, battling for every heart and mind.

We are going to fight back in elections, until we have a Congress and president who don’t think their job is to bend to your will.

And we will win. Because you simply cannot be allowed to achieve your ultimate goal.A year later the Internet is more central to our lives than ever and we at American Commitment are no less determined to protect it, even as regulations begin to dim its promise.

Thank you so much for everything you have done already and will do in the future to defend the free-market Internet.
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Phil Kerpen is president of American Commitment. Follow him at (@kerpen) and on Facebook. He is a contributing author at the ARRA News Service.

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