Les hommes politiques favorables \u00e0 l\u2019industrie ne reculeront devant rien pour renflouer leurs donateurs, m\u00eame si cela signifie ignorer la volont\u00e9 du public am\u00e9ricain.<\/p>
On Wednesday, every Republican on the House Appropriations Committee (and one Democrat, Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar) voted to block implementation of the FCC's historic net neutrality rules. Those rules, which went into effect last Friday, keep the Internet free and open for all Americans. The Internet is the town square of 21st-century democracy, not a playground for deep-pocketed corporations, and the rules ensure that it will stay that way.<\/p>
Tucked more than 100 pages into the bill is a rider that hamstrings the agency’s ability to \"implement, administer, or enforce\" any of those rules until (and this is a big until) pending net neutrality litigation against the FCC is resolved. The rider's language, as Representative Jose Serrano, D-NY, noted, throws the door wide open for corporate lawyers to stall implementation of the FCC's rules, possibly indefinitely.<\/p>
Serrano said that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit refused last week to delay implementation of the FCC's rules. Decisions on whether the rules should stand should come from the judicial system, Serrano argued; the rider just gave unhappy Republicans a way to circumvent the judicial process.<\/p>
Common Cause agrees. The FCC’s Open Internet rules reflect the views of more than 4 million Americans who submitted comments to the agency. The Court of Appeals had a chance to intervene but chose not to. It's not Congress’s job to undercut the judicial branch or defy the will of the public, but the committee’s vote does just that.<\/p>
\u00ab La Chambre du peuple devrait repr\u00e9senter la volont\u00e9 du peuple \u00bb, a d\u00e9clar\u00e9 Michael Copps, conseiller sp\u00e9cial de Common Cause et ancien commissaire de la FCC. \u00ab Le vote majoritaire du comit\u00e9 contre l\u2019Internet ouvert est totalement en d\u00e9calage avec les millions de personnes qui ont contact\u00e9 la FCC pour exiger \u2013 et obtenir \u2013 une concurrence en ligne historique et des garanties de libert\u00e9 d\u2019expression. \u00bb<\/p>
Les Am\u00e9ricains souhaitent que l'Internet reste libre et ouvert. La majorit\u00e9 de la commission des cr\u00e9dits a d\u00e9montr\u00e9 \u00e0 quel point elle est d\u00e9connect\u00e9e de la nation.<\/p>