As a foundation of this new push, legislators in July sent out letters to CEOs of major tech companies and major ISPs for a September trial to be held in face of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The conference was, the letter claimed, an occasion for stakeholders only apparently the wealthiest ones to “rethink the modern regulatory model and create new rules from the ground up” in Congress. Again, this is something ISPs have continued lobbying for understanding it either won’t happen or if it does will be so loophole-full as to be effective than useless.
Amusingly, though, none of the proposed CEOs from telecoms or Silicon Valley’s biggest, wealthiest corporations were involved in testifying openly at the hearing:
“Republican lawmakers had expected to bring top executives from tech businesses and internet providers to assert publicly in a bid to collect support for a deal to set firm rules on the future of internet access after a further than decade-long fight. No organization had publicly pledged to testify and many firms were personally reluctant to testify.”
The idea for this should be reasonably obvious. Large ISPs are quite happy to lie about their attack on popular consumer protections in brutally-misleading videos or disingenuous blog posts composed by a rotating growth of lawyers and lobbyists. But no CEO needs to directly own their business ugly, anti-consumer, anti-innovation, and anti-competitive situations personally in a public hearing, particularly given the shady role at the FCC and the increasing bipartisan state backlash to what Trump’s FCC is doing.
Furthermore, Google and Facebook don’t require to highlight that they quit supporting net neutrality in any significant fashion years ago, and in various parts of the world have repeatedly undermined the concept only to corner developing country ad revenues. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings doesn’t want to have to tell why the company’s support of net neutrality has decreased proportionally to the company’s growing control, and no major Silicon Valley CEO needs to own the fact their indifference on this subject has left small and mid-sized businesses, startups and consumers only and under-funded as they fight to keep the internet a nearly level playing field.
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