Net Neutrality: What's At 'Stake'

As the FCC prepared to vote on new network neutrality regs Tuesday morning, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) a vocal critic of the vote and the regs, took off the gloves. big time.Here is the “Nightmare Before Christmas” scenario she painted in the lead from her blog posting on RealClearPolitics:

“There’s no such thing as hospice for federal bureaucracies. No quiet corner where bureaus who have outlived their usefulness can go to bravely face the end. The undead need no such niceties; not when they can leap vampire-like upon the next great sector of American life and proceed to suck it dry in the name of “public interest”, “fair play”, or any other euphemistic glamour the Executive and Legislative branches can be lulled into.”

She suggested the new Congress would drive a stake through the heart of Count Genachowski. OK, technically it was to kill with sunlight (oversight, investigations?): “Like the breaking of dawn,” she said, “the new Congress will prove a swift antidote to the federal bloodsucker you found at your throat this Christmas.”

She also called the net neutrality order a “blind impulse to regulate,” an “Internet grab,” a “hysterical reaction” and a “redundant solution” to “hypothetical problems.”

Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.