Joe Barton: “I thank the distinguished subcommittee chairman. Madam Speaker, when I came to Congress in 1985, there was no such thing…”

“I thank the distinguished subcommittee chairman. Madam Speaker, when I came to Congress in 1985, there was no such thing as a cell phone. I remember my first mobile phone was a box phone. It cost about two bucks a minute to use, as I recall. We did have personal computers, but they were big and bulky and very slow. I still had a typewriter in my office, and I had constituents who still used telephones that actually had the dial, you know, the mechanical dial. That was in 1985. Today, we have over 2 billion users of the Internet. I have two BlackBerries. I have a laptop. I have a personal computer in my home. In fact, in my home in Arlington, Texas, we have two. The Internet has revolutionized telecommunications. Yet, in December of 2010, the FCC adopted a rule giving themselves the right to regulate the Internet. It gave them the right to regulate how fixed and mobile broadband providers disclose their network management practices and performance characteristics; to regulate how fixed and mobile broadband carriers provide access to content, applications, services, and devices; to determine whether the way fixed broadband providers are carrying network traffic is unreasonably discriminatory; to regulate how fixed and mobile broadband carriers charge for the carriage of traffic; and to determine whether fixed and mobile broadband providers' network management techniques are reasonable. This is the regulation of the Internet. Mr. Walden's bill is pretty straightforward.…”