The House Communications subcommittee held a markup Tuesday on the “Save the Internet Act,” which would restore Title II regulatory framework repealed by the FCC in December 2017. The legislation cleared the first hurdle in the House as lawmakers approved the bill in an 18-11 party-line vote after a relatively contentious markup.

Reactions to the referral to the full committee were swift, with NCTA predicting the bill will not pass in the Senate. “With today’s action, the subcommittee has stubbornly insisted on a partisan path that leads to a dead end,” the organization said. “The result of allergically resisting a bipartisan approach to resolving this decades-old issue is that consumers will fail to receive the net neutrality protections that are generally accepted and industry will not get the certainty it needs to invest more boldly.”

Gigi Sohn, a former aide of ex-FCC chmn Tom Wheeler and ex-head of Public Knowledge, said Tuesday that PK had initially supported net neutrality under Title I, but that changed after the courts said “you can’t have strong discrimination rules under Title I.” Sohn appeared on a panel at the Free State Foundation, a free markets-based think tank, at the same time the markup was happening Tuesday. “The reason the bill is in front of the markup right now is because it was the simplest way to take care of net neutrality, simply restore the 2015 Internet Order… But if you give the FCC strong authority under a different title… I think we can have a conversation,” Sohn said.

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