What is the parties' stance on net neutrality?

What is the parties' stance on net neutrality?

Matthew Jones (Political Science Instructor) gives expert video advice on: What is the parties' stance on media consolidation?; What is the parties' stance on telecom consolidation?; What is the parties' stance on telecom industries sharing information with the government? and more...

Net neutrality, at this point in time, or as we're speaking in this interview is probably not one of those issues that's not going to take a priority in either party. So what's going to happen is that the type of issue that's not going to follow along party lines so easily. Republicans aren't going to take a platform stance on it. Neither are Democrats really. And it's going to come down to individual politicians, individual legislators, individual regulators as to their position on net neutrality. And so what happens is because this isn't something that's in the consciousness of most voters and other things, the parties don't treat this as a big issue. They don't talk about it a whole lot, so they don't deal with it a whole lot. So the regulatory agency, in this case the FCC, has a lot of power because they are the ones to promulgate the rules about whether companies can charge more for different bandwidth or different speeds or not. And so since the FCC, as long as none of the politicians are paying attention the FCC gets to pretty much make the rules that it wants to within reasonable guidelines. Now if some politicians who are interested in net neutrality for their own policy reasons or for whatever reason, because they think it's important, don't like what the FCC is doing they'll create their own bill and try and get other legislators to pay attention to it. Because in something as insular as this is right now, the real battle is for attention. How do I get other people to pay attention to it so that I can actually get people to print this into the agenda floor and people to vote for it. But then it's usually not a partisan vote. It's just the people who will pay attention to it are for it, and the people who are not paying attention to it are worried about how it's going to affect their other issues that they really care about, and sometimes they're against it.