Gigi Sohn

Chairman Davis, Vice Chair Dumais, members of the Committee, my name is Gigi Sohn and I am a Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy and a Senior Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society. I have been a public interest advocate for open, affordable and accessible communications networks for over 30 years. I was Counselor to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler from 2013-2016, and during that time, I helped the FCC adopt the 2015 Open Internet Order, which included the strongest ever network neutrality rules.

Current research suggests that low-income people can only afford to pay about $10  monthly for broadband. Anything more competes with other utility bills and the cost of food. Meeting the goal of universal connectivity and providing fixed broadband at about $10 per month requires a multi-pronged strategy - what my Benton colleague Jonathan Sallet calls an “Affordability Agenda.” It includes:

For those of you unfamiliar with the merger, 17 months ago, in April 2018, T-Mobile and Sprint announced that they would merge in a deal valued at around $26 billion dollars and sought permission from the Justice Department to do so.

The US broadband and media industries are increasingly becoming consolidated, deregulated and freed of accountability, with little attention either from policymakers or the media. While Mexico is moving forward -- having recently developed new institutions and regulations intended to promote competition and accountability in telecommunications and media, the US is moving backwards. Competition in broadband and media in the US is vanishing as a result of decisions, big and small, by the Trump Administration. 

Last week, ten state attorneys general filed a lawsuit challenging the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint in a federal district court in New York. While it might not seem unusual for state officials tasked with enforcing antitrust and consumer protection laws to seek to halt the 4-to-3 horizontal merger of two of the nation’s mobile wireless companies, that the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice did not join the lawsuit was extraordinary.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has now decided that a handful of promises, made just days ago by T-Mobile and Sprint, puts this $26 billion transaction in the public interest. But these promises are speculative, unsubstantiated, and entirely unenforceable.

I worked on the Federal Communications Commission’s 2016 Broadband Privacy Rules, upon which L.D. 946, An Act to Protect Privacy of Online Customer Personal Information, is based. I urge the Joint Committee and the legislature to pass L.D. 946 without delay. It is common sense legislation that would require broadband Internet access providers operating in the state to protect the privacy of their customers. L.D. 946 would ensure that broadband customers have meaningful choice, greater transparency and strong security protections for their personal information collected by ISPs.

For the uninitiated, net neutrality is the principle that the companies that provide access to the Internet – Comcast, AT&T, Charter and Verizon, among others – should not be able to block, slow down, or otherwise discriminate against any particular content, application, or service. In other words, the companies providing the on-ramp to the Internet should not be able to pick winners and losers on the Internet.

I’ve been asked tonight to reflect on my career and talk about how I’ve been able to succeed in the field of telecommunications, media and technology policy.  So, I guess I’m at that point of my career where I’ve accomplished enough to impart wisdom to the next generation of lawyers…. or maybe I’m just really old. So tonight, I’d like to talk about three qualities that have allowed me to have a successful career: Flexibility, Humility, and Connectivity.   

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai would have you believe that the network neutrality repeal was of no consequence — the Internet wasn’t destroyed, cute pictures of cats and dogs are still in abundance, Google and Netflix are alive and well. But even in the short 6 months since the Dec 14, 2017 repeal of the net neutrality rules became effective, we have seen how consumers and competitors lose when broadband providers are given license to self-regulate and the FCC discards its responsibility to oversee the market.