New 'Net Neutrality' Bill Introduced

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Reps Ed Markey (D-MA) and Chip Pickering (R-MS) introduced the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008' (HR 5353) this week. The proposed legislation [PDF] would not legislate what is and is not 'neutral'. Instead, it would add a section to the 'Broadband Policy' section of the Communications Act which spells out principles the FCC is expected to uphold, in addition to having them hold summits which would 'assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues related to broadband Internet access services' and make it easy for citizens to submit comments or complaints online."

Comments

Re:Non news

[TheRaven64]

Less than 1% of the voting population ever writes to their representatives. That means, to an elected representative, each letter is assumed to represent at least 100 votes, often a few orders of magnitude more. Once my former local MP explained this to me, I started writing whenever an issue of importance to me came up.

Re:This is a good thing

[Jherek Carnelian]

Since there isn't yet a problem for Net Neutrality laws to fix, it seems a little early to define what is and isn't net neutrality. Net neutrality was the law of the land in the USA until just a couple of years ago.

In 2005 the supreme court reclassified ISPs as "information providers" rather than "telecommuniactions providers." Those terms have specific meaning under the tariffs that regulate the telecom industry. Essentially "telecommunications providers" have a set of rules they must abide by that include most of the concepts generally referred to under the umbrella of "network neutrality" while "information providers" are not so regulated.

Brand X