On the recordApril 8, 2011
I was astounded by the comment of our friend on the Republican side of the aisle who is not on our committee. He said that the antitrust laws will protect us. Well, if you have a cable company or a phone company to choose, you are going to choose one or the other. Let's say the cable company has its own list of special programs that they want people to purchase. Well, they could easily stop Netflix. They could easily stop competitive programming. That is not an antitrust violation; that is a business opportunity. And what these rules propose to do is to not give anybody a business opportunity to deny the consumer the ability to access anything on the Web, which is the case today. These rules that we see the FCC doing are being put into place to make sure that somebody does not take advantage of the power they have in the market. We do that all the time. We regulate the securities agencies with the SEC because we don't want them to run amuck. I wish the SEC had acted to stop the economy from going over the cliff practically. The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
