Top House GOPers urge president to reverse FCC course on broadband

Top House Republicans on Wednesday implored President Barack Obama to "rein in" the FCC's plan to assert clearer authority over Internet providers.

In a letter to President Barack Obama, House GOP Leader John Boehner (Ohio) and Republican Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) slammed the commission's proposal as a "politically-motivated end-run around both the courts and Congress."

While the FCC has insisted it needs more explicit authority over broadband, after a federal court in April said its justification for doing so fell outside the confines of current law, the GOP duo said the new plan was merely an attempt to implement net neutrality -- the idea that Internet companies should treat all traffic differently.

"The FCC's political agenda threatens to slow job-creating investments and jeopardizes our economic recovery," the two lawmakers wrote. "It's not too late to rein in the FCC's push to regulate the Internet."

FCC officials are likely to take great issue with Republican lawmakers' characterization of their plans on Wednesday. Among other things, Chairman Julius Genachowski has oft repeated that the goal is not to regulate the Internet, but only to exert clearer authority on the companies that currently provide it. Other supporters, including Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, have said it is not necessarily an attempt to introduce tough open Internet rules.

Instead, they say the plan arrives in response to an April court decision that found the commission lacked explicit legal authority to regulate how those Internet firms manage their Web traffic. The ruling jeopardized much of the FCC's new National Broadband Plan and left the commission with the choice of reclassifying broadband essentially as a phone service, or punting the issue entirely to Congress.

The FCC instead chose to apply to broadband only a select series of rules that already govern phone companies in an attempt to restore the legal environemt that existed before the April court decision. But the move has nonetheless infuriated the providers themselves, who believe the FCC has overshot its own legal mandate.  And the plan has further incensed Republicans in Congress, who also see it only as a backdoor to institute tough net neutrality rules.

Both Boehner and Cantor predicted that approach would only stifle investment in a sector of the economy that has recently posted strong gains.

"With nearly 10 percent unemployment the new 'network neutrality' plan announced last week by the [FCC] could hardly come at a worse time for our nation's economy, which is already struggling against a steady flow of increased government spending and taxation from Washington.

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