House Commerce Approves Small Business Broadband Deployment Act Without Objections
The House Commerce Committee approved a modified version of the Small Business Broadband Deployment Act (HR-4596) Thursday with Democratic backing, as expected (see 1602240060). That earned praise from industry officials. Both the bipartisan amendment and then the legislation received uncontroversial…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
voice votes. The legislation would exempt small businesses from the FCC net neutrality order’s enhanced transparency requirements, which on a temporary basis currently exempt ISPs with fewer than 100,000 subscribers. The bill originally would have codified that and raised the threshold definition of a small business to 500,000 subscribers, which spurred Democratic opposition during the subcommittee markup. A bipartisan compromise between Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, settled on a 250,000-subscriber cutoff in defining a small business and included a five-year sunset provision. “I was glad we were able to reach a conclusion in a fair and balanced way,” Walden said. “This is what folks want us to do,” Loebsack said during the markup. The American Cable Association, the Competitive Carriers Association, CTIA, NTCA, the Telecom Industry Association and USTelecom issued statements lauding the compromise and supporting committee approval. “NTCA devoted significant effort to working with these offices to explain how the requirements would affect small businesses,” CEO Shirley Bloomfield said. Walden released a discussion draft of the original legislation in January and formally introduced the bill as HR-4596 Wednesday. Net neutrality advocates originally had warned against the measure. "Today’s amendment modestly improves the original bill, but this legislation remains a solution in search of a problem," said New America Open Technology Institute Policy Counsel Josh Stager. "The FCC already granted an exemption from its transparency rules for small providers. The bill’s sponsors have not demonstrated why Congress needs to step in now, or why being transparent with customers is burdensome for ISPs. Every consumer deserves basic Open Internet protections regardless of whether their ISP is big or small." Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood dismissed the bipartisan compromise as “a giveaway to ISPs claiming that it’s a burden to comply with the Open Internet Order’s sensible obligation to provide useful information to their own customers.” The compromise cutoff “exempts every single provider other than a couple dozen of the nation’s largest cable and phone companies,” Wood said.