US Congressman Wants To Ban New Internet Laws 205
SchrodingerZ writes "Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican congressman from California, has drafted a bill for the internet. The bill, aptly named the Internet American Moratorium Act (IAMA), is, 'a two-year moratorium on any new laws, rules or regulations governing the Internet.' In short it hopes to deny any new government bills related to lawmaking on the internet for the next two years. The bill was first made public on the website Reddit, and is currently on the front page of Keepthewebopen.com, a website advocating internet rights. 'Together we can make Washington take a break from messing w/ the Internet,' Issa writes on his Reddit post. The initial response to the bill has been mixed. Users of Reddit are skeptical of the paper's motives and credibility. As of now, the bill is just a discussion draft, whether it will gain footing in the future is up in the air."
Re:My worry is... (Score:4, Informative)
Some from column A, some from column B. It would make it harder for the government to directly interfere in various ways, but would also make it harder for the government to enforce any kind of utility-style fair-access or net-neutrality rules (since those would be "regulations").
Re:My worry is... (Score:5, Informative)
Darrell Issa strongly opposes net neutrality [theverge.com], with a Republican platform that supports some ironic thing called "internet freedom" [theverge.com]. Last year, Issa ripped into FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski [pcworld.com] at a Congressional hearing, accusing him of doing Obama's bidding regarding net neutrality (wtf?).
In short, Issa is a conservative Republican who has been on a mission to destroy net neutrality.
Re:My worry is... (Score:2, Informative)
As net neutrality, from Congress, would be a new law, this would block net neutrality. And that's 100% of its purpose.
That's not the big part anyway (Score:4, Informative)
The meat of the bill is the part where it forbids any regulatory agency from creating new rules. Remember, regulatory agencies operate under the authority of Congress, certain functions reserved to Congress under the Constitution being delegated by Congress to that agency under that laws that created it.
But in general, each Congress can make its own rules, and is not restrained by previous Congresses. Usually, they just adopt the previous Congress' rules. But they can make a rule that binds them for the rest of the Congress. Technically the rule can be rescinded, but that can be made much harder to do than simply passing legislation that the rule prohibits. In addition, if the rule has popular support, then those pushing to rescind the rule will be at a political disadvantage.