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The U.S. House just voted to reinstate net neutrality, but the Senate may stand in the way

Senator Mitch McConnell says the bill is DOA at the U.S. Senate.

The U.S. House just voted to reinstate net neutrality, but the Senate may stand in the way

[Photos: Architect of the Capitol/Wikimedia Commons; Joshua Sortino/Unsplash]

BY Melissa Locker1 minute read

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to save the internet. Specifically, they voted for the Save the Internet Act, a bill introduced last month in both chambers by Representative Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). If passed, it would reinstate the same net neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) controversially voted to repeal in 2017.

The bill was approved in a vote of 232-190 on Wednesday afternoon. If it passes both the House and Senate, the bill will restore the net neutrality rules put in place by way of the Obama-era FCC’s Open Internet Order in 2015 that required internet service providers to treat all web traffic equally.

Of course, the Democrats are in the majority for the House of Representatives, while Republicans hold a slim margin in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader and apparent slow internet fan Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has already said the bill is “dead on arrival” in the Senate.

That’s despite the fact that, as the Hill points out, a majority of the Senate voted to reinstate the Obama-era FCC’s net neutrality rules last year, with three Senate Republicans—Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and John Kennedy (R-LA)–joining the Senate Democrats to pass a similar bill.

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Things have changed, though, and the Republicans now have a larger majority. The current attorney general, William Barr, abhors net neutrality, and the White House has already threatened to veto the new bill.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Melissa Locker is a writer and world renowned fish telepathist. More


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