Senators put representatives of internet service providers on the hot seat Wednesday at a hearing on a Senate bill intended to promote fair internet practices known as net neutrality.
Internet service providers (ISPs) and their representatives have said they do not currently and do not intend to slow connection speeds for some users, block access to certain content or give preferential treatment to certain content. Nonetheless, they lined up in opposition to legislation that would make those practices illegal in Massachusetts.
“This proposal will harm investment, will harm Massachusetts’ world-class tech economy because it proposes a heavy-handed regulatory overreach for a problem that frankly doesn’t exist,” Tim Wilkerson, vice president and general counsel to the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association, told the Special Senate Committee on Net Neutrality and Consumer Protection.
The committee’s recommended legislation ban ISPs from blocking customers from accessing certain content, throttling down the speed at which a customer can connect to certain websites and accepting fees in exchange for faster connectivity. The bill would also prohibit ISPs from collecting, using or sharing a consumer’s personal data without their consent.
In December, the FCC approved an order reversing its Obama-era net neutrality rules, which deemed internet service a public utility and required internet providers to treat all traffic equally.
Wilkerson said the ISPs that are members of NECTA “support and adhere to the principles of net neutrality every day while employing thousands of Massachusetts residents and investing over a billion dollars annually in the Commonwealth’s economy.” But, he said, the organization opposes the Senate’s bill.
“Consumers deserve a single, durable federal law to enshrine both net neutrality and privacy principles, not contrasting state approaches to the most intrinsically interstate commerce, the internet,” he said.
Gerard Keegan, assistant vice president of state legislative affairs for the wireless communications trade group CTIA, also told the committee that state-by-state regulation would be “untenable” for the wireless industry. He said the members of his organization support net neutrality ideals and would support federal legislation on the issue.
Wednesday’s hearing included a few tense moments between opponents of the bill and the senators who crafted it. At the end of his testimony, Wilkerson told the committee that he “would ask you respectfully to direct all your questions to our [written] testimony” and began to get up from the witness table.
That didn’t sit well with Sen. Cynthia Creem, who led the special commission that drafted the bill. She interjected with “Sir, don’t leave” and then began to ask questions of Wilkerson, as is the standard practice at committee hearings.
After answering one of Creem’s questions and listening to the second, Wilkerson said, “Senator, I’m going to say I’ve heard your questions before…”
“But you haven’t answered them before,” Creem shot back before he could finish his sentence. Wilkerson later said he is not the right person to answer Creem’s questions.
Creem pressed both Wilkerson and Keegan about whether their organizations would sign a memorandum of understanding with the state to certify their claim that they will not violate the principles of net neutrality.
“Your people are not doing anything that we want to prevent, so it is a suggestion that they put that in some sort of a written order or something with the commonwealth of Massachusetts so my constituents and all of our constituents can say, ‘We’re going to hold you accountable,’” Creem said.