"The Fight for Network Neutrality Continues"

If they got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, they are capable of screwing around with the internet. Ed Markey writes

While the amendment lost thanks to all Republican members save one voting against it, we clearly now have the momentum swinging to our side. Sometime in the coming two weeks, the House leadership will bring the so-called "COPE Act" (HR 5252) to the House floor, where I will again attempt to attach real net neutrality protections to the legislation.

The COPE Act is woefully deficient in protecting the Internet. Its provisions essentially bless the broadband designs of a few large companies, such as AT&T and Verizon, over those of thousands of web-based businesses, entrepreneurs, and individual citizens.

It is vital that we enact meaningful network neutrality provisions as soon as possible, because the threat facing the Internet is very real. Recent decisions by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and court interpretations clearly put these aspects of broadband networks and the Internet in jeopardy. The replacement of historic policies of nondiscrimination with the imposition of bottleneck taxes by broadband network owners endangers economic growth, innovation, job creation, and First Amendment freedom of expression on such networks. Broadband network owners should not be able to determine who can and who cannot offer services over broadband networks or over the Internet. The detrimental effect to the digital economy would be quite severe if such conduct were permitted and became widespread.

Do we really have to wait till these corporate giants divide and conquer the open architecture of the Internet to make that against the law? These telephone company executives are telling us that they intend to discriminate in the prioritization of bits and to discriminate in the offering of "quality of service" functions - for a new fee, a new broadband bottleneck toll - to access high bandwidth customers. We cannot afford to wait until they actually start doing that before we step in to stop it.

One would think that this would be a perfect issue for the "netroots" to get active about.