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The House Rules Committee late Wednesday agreed to two amendments on network neutrality to the telecommunications bill that is being considered on Thursday and Friday by the House.A total of eight amendments were agreed to, including a manager's amendment and two tweaks by supporters of the legislation. The other three amendments concerned the applicability of the universal service fund to Internet telephone calls, increasing potential penalties on discriminatory conduct by national video franchise holders, and a fee-reduction measure for women-owned or small-business cable operators. The debate on the rule governing consideration of the telecom bill is expected for Thursday. The actual measure will come before the House on Friday.
The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it. By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others. Of the 421 House members who participated in the vote that took place around 6:30 p.m. PT, the vast majority of Net neutrality supporters were Democrats. Republicans represented most of the opposition. The future Sergey Brins, the future Marc Andreessens, of Netscape and Google...are going to have to pay taxes" to broadband providers, said Rep. Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat behind the Net neutrality amendment. This vote will change "the Internet for the rest of eternity," he warned.
Internet companies, led by search giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, may well regret they ever started the debate about so-called Net neutrality if a US Democratic Congressman has his way. The content providers want the US Government to regulate broadband network operators so that they can't discriminate between content providers by introducing a tiered pricing structure for piping content through the internet.Now House of Representatives member from Texas, Charles Gonzalez, has put forward an amendment to the proposed Network Neutrality section of the Communications Act, which seeks to brings content providers under the very same regulatory legislation that they want to impose on broadband network providers
Sen. Hillary Clinton has thrown her support behind "network neutrality” regulations that conservatives say mark the first major attempt by the federal government to regulate the Internet.In a mass e-mail to supporters, Clinton writes: "I want to tell you a little bit about Net neutrality, why I believe it’s so important to our democracy, and what you can do to help.”In the Net neutrality debate, cable and telephone companies that provide Internet service, including AT&T and Verizon, are pitted against major Internet players like Google and Amazon and large-scale users, like the left-wing MoveOn.org.Clinton goes on to call for government interference, writing: "I’ve become an original co-sponsor of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, which would prevent Internet service providers from blocking, degrading, or giving a lower priority service on their networks
When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA. Net neutrality is this: If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level. That's all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens. Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free. Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn't pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will. There have been suggestions that we don't need legislation because we haven't had it. These are nonsense, because in fact we have had net neutrality in the past -- it is only recently that real explicit threats have occurred. Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV distribution over the Internet even though it is against the long-term interests of the industry. Yes, regulation to keep the Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can't photocopy money. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it. Let's see whether the United States is capable as acting according to its important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying, run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations. I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.
Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. In China, control is by the government for political reasons.)
