John Kerry: “this is one of those times when, on the floor of the Senate, we hear a proposal that people characterize as one thing…”

“this is one of those times when, on the floor of the Senate, we hear a proposal that people characterize as one thing, but it is, in fact, anything but what they are characterizing it as. What I just heard the good Senator from Mississippi talking about: We don't want to slam the brakes on development, he said. We don't want to have the SEC intrusion. So they are trying to say to the American people that they want to liberate the Internet, when, in fact, what they want to do is imprison the Internet within the hands of the most powerful communications entities today to act as the gatekeepers who will control the ability of the Internet to do the very kind of development that brought us here. What they are talking about, their concept, this CRA challenge is that wolf in sheep's clothing. It is that simple. So I think colleagues need to step back and think about how the Internet got to be what it is today when it was developed. I know the Senator from West Virginia, the chairman of the committee, and I were members of the Commerce Committee back in the 1990s when we wrote the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and we thought we were pretty clever and we wrote a good act. Within 6 months of writing that act, it was obsolete because all our conversation was about telephony at a moment where, because of the Internet, the entire discussion was about to become about data transmission and the movement of information over the Internet. That has never been fully revisited.…”