Ed Markey: “I thank the gentlelady. In 2 days, the Republicans have proven that they always side with the biggest behemoth…”

“I thank the gentlelady. In 2 days, the Republicans have proven that they always side with the biggest behemoth companies. Yesterday, they said it was okay for the biggest oil and coal and chemical companies to pollute the atmosphere. Today, they are saying that it's okay for the biggest communications companies to totally control the entire blogosphere. They want to spoil Mother Earth and Google Earth all in a 24-hour period. They want to allow the domination of the World Wide Web and the pollution of the whole wide world all in 24 hours. Let me give you a little history here, ladies and gentlemen. We had no competition in the Internet, in the wireless world. In 1993, there were two companies--analog, 50 cents a minute. No one had cell phones in their companies. ``We'' had to move over the 200 megahertz. ``We'' had to say there was a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth company so that there would be competition and then block the first two companies that were not innovating. Why were they not innovating? Because there was no Darwinian paranoia inducing competition to force them to move. Then in 1996, when the whole country was analog, we had to pass another bill to move them to digital, to move them to broadband, because the behemoths had yet to deploy broadband to one home in the United States. No competition. No innovation. No benefits to consumers.…”