Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the President's nomination of Ajit Pai to head the Federal Communications Commission. My view is that, Mr. Pai will do an enormous amount of damage to one of the foundational principles of the internet--net neutrality. I am going to outline why that would be a horrendous mistake for our country. After we came to use the internet and see what an extraordinary asset it would be to our country, really beginning in the late 1990s, and early 2000s, we laid out what I still consider to be the legal foundation for the internet. On a bipartisan basis, there was a big effort in the Senate and the House to really lay out what were the foundational principles of the net, and there were a variety of them. We wanted to make sure that folks were not hit with multiple and discriminatory taxes, and that they were not taxed on access to the internet. We wrote the digital signatures act, which is of enormous benefit to people, for example, in the Presiding Officer's home State of Nevada, where they are making business transactions. We made a judgment, which some have said has led to $1 trillion worth of private wealth for our economy, whereby we said that we were not going to expose the small entrepreneur--the person who is getting started in the garage--to needless litigation. One of those core principles was net neutrality, which, in my view, for the reasons that I am going to describe this morning, I think Mr.…”