Good Afternoon.  Tomorrow the Committee will take a historic vote.  At stake, is the fate of the Internet as we know it. 

Tomorrow, I will be offering a “Network Neutrality” amendment, cosponsored by Mr. Boucher, Ms. Eshoo, and Mr. Inslee, to preserve the Internet and its open, non-discriminatory nature.  Since the Subcommittee vote, dozens of web blogs have started talking about this issue.  A broad coalition has launched web campaigns, such as www.savetheinternet.com, and www.dontmesswiththenet.com. These coalitions are diverse and growing hourly.  They include leading Internet companies such as Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, as well as entrepreneurs, small businesses, consumer groups, Common Cause, Gun Owners of America, the National Religious Broadcasters, moveon.org, the ACLU, and thousands of concerned citizens.  I welcome the support of the Internet community in our legislative efforts.   

The reason for the heightened interest is that tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of thousands of American businesses use and rely upon the Internet every day.  In addition to its vital economic role, the Internet is also an unparalleled vehicle for open communications by non-commercial users, for religious speech, for civic involvement, and our First Amendment freedoms.

Yet the Internet is at endangered because of the misguided provisions of the bill before us, which put at grave risk the Internet as an engine of innovation, job creation, and economic growth.   The bill permits the imposition of new fees, or “broadband bottleneck taxes” for Internet sites to access high-bandwidth consumers.  This will stifle openness, endanger our global competitiveness, and warp the web into a tiered Internet of bandwidth haves and have-nots.  It is the introduction of creeping Internet protectionism into the free and open World Wide Web.
     
Tomorrow’s network neutrality debate will present members with a choice.  It is a choice between favoring the broadband designs of a small handful of very large companies or safeguarding the dreams of thousands of inventors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses.  Tomorrow we will either vote to preserve the Internet as we know it, or instead, vote to fundamentally and detrimentally alter it. 
           
The underlying bill also departs from the historic principle of non-discrimination and competition in the context of national cable franchises.  The proposed bill permits a national franchise for cable service, grants multi-billion dollar companies access to public rights-of-way, yet has no service area requirement for providing cable service.  By failing to include a build-out provision to ensure service area parity between a Bell company entering a franchise area and the incumbent cable operator, it allows a national franchisee to use public rights-of-way in a community but serve only select neighborhoods within the community. 

Now, getting access to a community’s public rights-of-way without any obligation to serve the whole community is a sweetheart deal for phone companies.  But it is a raw deal for the neighborhoods that will be skipped over or ignored. 
           
Moreover, the bill compounds the consumer risk when the omission of a service area requirement is considered in the context of an incumbent cable operator qualifying for a national franchise.  Under the Barton bill, an incumbent cable operator may seek a national franchise after the phone company arrives in a franchise area, even if the phone company is serving just one household in the franchise area.  The lack of a service area requirement at the national level then means that the incumbent cable operator no longer has to serve the entire franchise either.  In other words, the operator is free to skimp on service upgrades or withdraw service from any part of their historic service area within the affected community.  The incumbent may also raise rates in areas of the community the phone company is not serving in order to cross-subsidize its offering in the part of town the phone company has chosen to serve. 
        
The prospect of cable service withdrawal, poorer service quality, and rate hikes represents a serious consumer protection flaw in the bill and only a provision ensuring service area parity can effectively remedy this flaw.
           
Thank you and I look forward to the debate and the votes tomorrow.