Sherry Chandler

Save the Internet

from Talking Points Memo:

Last week I mentioned that there’s a very bad bill moving through Congress. It’s supported overwhelmingly by Republicans but also by a lot of Democrats too. Basically the bill would turn over the control of the Internet to the phone companies — though ‘phone companies’ is probably now an antiquated phrase for Verizon and AT&T and other such outfits. There’s a lot more underlying complexity to it of course. But the change could make it much harder to access TPM or any source of news or entertainment that isn’t owned by some big corporation or, more likely, have the inside track with one of the phone companies. If you’re cool with AT&T deciding the sources of use you can access then you probably won’t mind. But if you like making those decisions yourself, you may want to speak up.

Here’s one group mobilizing against the bill: savetheinternet.com. Another group that is on the case is publicknowledge.org.

This isn’t some obscure issue of interest only to policy wonks. It may seem like it, but it’s not. It’s a very big deal and I strongly encourage you to find out what’s going on.

MoveOn.org is also active in this fight. Whatever you may think of Al Gore, I would urge you to look into this bill and make your voice heard.

A slightly different perspective from The Washington Monthly:

NET NEUTRALITY….I’ve been trying to understand this whole “net neutrality” thing and I’ve failed utterly. I just can’t figure out the underlying issues.

On the one hand, the telecom industry says they just want to be able guarantee service levels (for a price) for high-value, high-bandwidth services like on-demand video. This does not seem very alarming to me. Companies already buy bigger pipes and negotiate quality-of-service agreements when they need guaranteed bandwidth, and that’s never caused any problems. Bloggers are accustomed to paying their hosts based on the bandwidth they plan to use, for example, and this seems like more of the same on a larger scale.

At the same time, the CEO of Qwest claims that “No one should deny or impede access to lawful sites on the Web. Everyone supports that position.” But in fact, last year a small broadband provider decided to block access to Vonage phone service — so apparently support for that position isn’t quite as universal as Qwest’s CEO claims.

What’s more, if the real issue is that telecom companies want to be able to offer higher service levels to certain customers but would never reduce service levels for other customers — well then, why not write that into law? Especially if “everyone” supports this position?

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