Press Release

House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Greg Walden (R-OR), Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Bob Latta (R-OH), and Consumer Protection Ranking Member Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) released the following statement after 47 Democratic representatives – led by Reps Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Scott Peters (D-CA) – signed a letter to Democratic leadership looking to form a bipartisan working group to solve network neutrality.

Sen Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced the Government Spectrum Valuation Act, a bill designed to estimate the value of electromagnetic spectrum assigned to each federal agency as a first step towards meeting the nations spectrum needs.

The future of competition in high-speed broadband access looks bleak. A vast majority of homes only have their cable monopoly as their choice for speeds in excess of 100 mbps and small ISPs and local governments are carrying the heavy load of deploying fiber networks that surpass gigabit cable networks. Research now shows that these new monopolies have striking similarities to the telephone monopolies of old. But we don’t have to repeat the past; we’ve already seen how laws promoted competition and broke monopolies. In the United States, high-speed fiber deployment is low and slow.

I commend the US Senate for passing the TRACED Act and Sens John Thune (R-SD) and Ed Markey (D-MA) for leading this bipartisan effort. The TRACED Act would help strengthen the FCC’s ability to combat illegal robocalls, and we would welcome these additional tools to fight this scourge. Further powers like increased fines, longer statutes of limitations, and removing citation requirements which obligate us to warn some robocallers before penalizing them, will significantly improve our already strong robocall enforcement efforts.

Reps. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) and Collin Peterson (D-MN) introduced the Rural Broadband Network Advancement (RBNA) Act, which would invest in expanding broadband access in rural areas. The bill would establish a new program at the Federal Communications Commission that would collect Network User Fees from edge providers (Netflix, AmazonVideo, etc.) based on the data transported over the last mile of networks. User fees would then be invested by the rural broadband providers to help build, maintain and operate robust broadband networks in high-cost rural areas.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai visited East Central Electric Cooperative in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, to discuss how a recent FCC investment will help connect rural Oklahomans to high-speed internet service. East Central is receiving $22.2 million to deploy gigabit connections to over 7,700 locations in rural Oklahoma. “I’m pleased that East Central Electric Coop will help close that divide by using FCC support to connect rural Oklahomans,” said Chairman Pai.

The United States 5G Leadership Act of 2019 legislation would establish US policy for the commercial deployment and security of fifth generation (5G) networks by creating the Supply Chain Security Trust Fund grant program. This program would help US communications providers remove from their networks Chinese equipment determined to threaten national security. The bill:

Apparently, a handful of Democratic Reps are shopping around a letter that echoes internet service provider lobbyist talking points, incorrectly claiming that the Save the Internet Act to restore network neutrality is dead and calling for the creation of a disingenuous “bipartisan working group,” modeled after the one created in the Senate by Sens Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who are widely seen as enemies of the effort to restore net neutrality. The group is rumored to be led by Reps Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) Scott Peters (D-CA) who together have taken hundreds of thousands

Rep Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) led the introduction of a bipartisan bill to protect next-generation telecommunications systems and mobile infrastructure in the United States. Rep Spanberger introduced the legislation alongside Rep Susan W. Brooks (R-IN), Tom O’Halleran (D-AZ), Francis Rooney (R-FL), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), and Elise Stefanik (R-NY).

Sens Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) reintroduced the bipartisan Rural Reasonable and Comparable Wireless Access Act to help close the rural-urban digital divide and expand access to broadband in rural parts of West Virginia, New Hampshire, and across the country. The Act directs the Federal Communications Commission to establish a national standard for determining whether mobile and broadband services in rural areas are “reasonably comparable” to service provided in urban areas.