Senate Democrats have made a brilliant move to try and save an open internet

Claire McCaskill

Democrat senators have gathered enough support to force the Senate to vote on restoring net neutrality.
They only need a simple majority to win this vote.
While that's a long shot, there's still a good political reason for them to force a vote: It will force Republican senators to take a public stand on this hot-button issue.

On Monday, Senator Claire McCaskill announced that she was the 30th senator to call for the Senate to vote on net-neutrality rules.

Thirty senators is the "magic number of cosponsors needed to get #net neutrality vote in the full senate," she tweeted.

Net neutrality means that internet service providers – like your cable company – can't do things like slow down or block apps or charge more to let you access them. They have to remain neutral and open to any app. For instance, it forbids them from slowing down apps from their competitors (such as Netflix or Google).

The rules were put in place during the Obama Administration to keep the people who own the wires that bring you the internet – for which you pay a monthly fee – from using their ownership of those wires to give themselves a competitive advantage on other businesses they own.

Under the Trump Administration, last month the FCC voted to repeal net neutrality, ignoring or discounting an outpouring of comments from the tech industry that believes handing such control over to cable companies and other ISPs is a bad for everyone but the ISPs.

Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, immediately introduced a plan to introduce a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would allow the Senate to vote to restore the 2015 open-internet rules. 29 Senators signed on to support it — and McCaskill just became No. 30.

As you might expect, all of these senators are Democrats. So forcing a vote alone isn't enough to get the open-internet rules restored. The act requires a simple majority vote, so at least seven Republican senators would have to vote to support the effort, too.

But that's the brilliant part.

Even if everyone votes along party lines and this vote fails, senators will have had to take a public stand either way. And those Republicans that voted against the act will have handed a bit of politically-charged fodder to be used against them during the upcoming 2018 elections.

Activist groups like Fight for the Future have instituted campaigns like VoteForNetNeutrality.com, which asks people to vow to vote against lawmakers who won't vote for the CRA resolution to restore the 2015 rules.

All of this is, of course, a long shot. Of the 34 senate seats up for election in 2018, 25 are seats held by Democrats.

But activism has worked in the past on this issue. An outpouring by the internet community was the reason why the FCC passed the net-neutrality regulations in the first place back in 2015.

And senators may be aware that there's a lot of anger over this issue. FCC chairman Ajit Pai, who led the repeal of net-neutrality rules last month, abruptly cancelled his appearance at the CES trade show this month due to death threats. This is the first time since 2009 that the FCC chairman didn't appear at CES.

So, from the Democrats' point of view, there's not a lot of hope that they will win this battle — but there's every reason to try.

McCaskill tweet