Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal

LiquidEdge writes "A Republican controlled committee has defeated a bill that would have guaranteed fair access and stopped companies like AT&T and Verizon from charging high-bandwidth sites for allowing their customers to have priority access to them."

Comments

Correct the Headline

[C-Diddy]

A transparently lame and misleading headline. Read the story. The story says the "republican controlled committee" defeated the proposed amendment. According to the story:

"By an 8-to-23 margin, the committee members rejected a Democratic-backed "Net neutrality" amendment to a current piece of telecommunications legislation.

The story does not mention which "subcommittee" of the House Energy and Commerce committee took the action, but the story does say several democrats voted against the measure:

The vote on the amendment itself did not occur strictly along party lines, with one Republican voting in favor and four Democrats voting against it.

Interestingly, the final measure, sans the amendment, was passed by an overwhelming 24-7 vote.

Re:Correct the Headline

[theoddball]

The subcommittee in question is the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, chaired by Rep. Fred Upton (R, MI-6). Upton's not a terrible rep, but he is basically beholden to the telcos. (Check where his lobbying dollars come from. Tons of telco money.)

Rep. Ed Markey (author of the amendment) sits on this subcommittee, and has been one of the guys in Congress who has pretty consistently sided with the /. crowd on telco issues, privacy issues, etc.

On the whole, it's not too surprising that you'd get Dems crossing the lines to support this one. Telecom is an industry where EVERYbody gets paid, regardless of political affiliation.

Re:I'm glad, believe it or not.

[ClarkEvans]

Well, this bill was to support the idea that "no external entity should suffer discrimination when trying to get their packets to me".

What's going on is that packets from/to Vonage, and other voice over IP companies are being marked by Comcast, and Verison as 3rd class mail: if they are even permitted. This law was to prevent this pratice.

This law had nothing to do with providers charging more for a T3 over a T1 for a web-service company. That would be brain dead to argue against. This was about network neutrality: that *infrastructure* companies can pick-and-choose what content you can get to and what content you cant (and what content is so damn slow you won't ever use it).

Re:good....?

[Zocalo]

Actually, you've probably got that slightly wrong. It's not so much "who their customers are" as "who their customers *were*". All Amazon, Google, Yahoo! et al need to do is agree not to cave in to the telcos demands for more money (they *are* presumably paying for their own connectivity, yes?) and sit it out - Google has pretty much stated they are going to do this anyway. After a while, once the word gets out and customers start to leave for alterative "single tier Internet" providers, the telcos will either have to quietly drop their demands and rate limits or suffer the inevitable stockholder backlash when their profits start to slide.

Re:Makes Sense

[molarmass192]

"regulate the market"

If there was perfect competition in the ISP market, then fine, let market forces rule! However, the 1st tier ISP market today is far more oligopolistic than free market. You can bet that if there was perfect competition, this idea would not even have the slightest chance of gaining traction. Free market capitalism only works in competitive markets, that's why price fixing is illegal in the US. Sadly, the ISP market is beginning to resemble the telephone market, highly concentrated ownership, limited competition.