Posted on 06/09/2006 5:26:45 AM PDT by mathprof
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 vote on the amendment came after nearly a full day of debate on the topic, which prominent Democrats predicted would come to represent a turning point in the history of the Internet. [snip]
At issue is a lengthy measure called the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement (COPE) Act, which a House committee approved in April. Its Republican backers, along with broadband providers such as Verizon and AT&T, say it has sufficient Net neutrality protections for consumers, and more extensive rules would discourage investment in wiring American homes with higher-speed connections.[snip]
Defenders of the COPE Act, largely Republicans, dismissed worries about Net neutrality as fear mongering.
"I want a vibrant Internet just like they do," said Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican. "Our disagreement is about how to achieve that. They say let the government dictate it...I urge my colleagues to reject government regulation of the Internet."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.zdnet.com ...
Because under this scheme, Amazon, eBay, Google, and every other big content provider will be paying money to the telcos in order to get their content to the consumer with decent speed.
The telcos forget that the ONLY reason people are paying for their services in the first place is that there's content to be downloaded.
It hasn't happened yet.A more likely occurrance would be that 8Mbps lines come into common use in this country as in Korea and telecos throttle some lines back to 1.5 Mbps (which would be a win-win thing)
Competition, the perferred solution, exist.
Net neutrality can always be revisted (or existing anti-trust laws can be invoked) if it doesn't work
I already have a wired and a wireless connection and a choice each time I turn on the PC. I could also set up a router to choose for me.
It's net neutrality that made FR possible in the first place. Do you think that in the beginning JR could have afforded the extra fee to let us visit FR with any decent speed? No, the MSM and cronies would have bought out all the high-speed access, letting us get only their news, everybody else relegated to the slow, second-class Internet that nobody visits.
Lack of net neutrality will create two classes of content providers: those with lots of money and those without. Those with money will be able to reach the people, those without will have a hard time doing so.
IIRC, what makes the Internet great is that anybody can be a publisher with great reach, or a world-wide businessman, with little capital investment. That great equalizer will now go away.
I am not talking about WiFi access or wireless routers.
I am talking about EVDO and later there will be WIMAX followed by global wireless metworks that will render obsolete anything that is wired.
Checkout the link I posted previously.
Normally I'm for getting the government out of things, but there are two big factors here. First, the government invented the Internet (well, paid to have it invented). Second, we're getting into common carrier stuff here. What a few companies decide to do can have a negative effect not just on our economy, but on our freedom of speech and association online.
"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 ..."
So what you are telling me is that yet again, House Republicans have yet again failed to listen to the Christian Coalition and Gun Owners of America?
32 years with SBC/AT&T in IT, including broadband development......I understand the impact, yet I also understand that service levels can be enforced rather quickly by the simple threat civil suits.
No gubment legislative-jerk needed..thankyouverymuch!
Sounds good, but there are several conflicting descriptions of the issue that can make it sound anyway we want. What would be handy is a link to the actual legislation proposed/pending elsewhere for us to push/stop.
Nine times out of ten, new government laws are the problem and not the solution. My worry in this case is the telecom gang becoming a law unto itself by seizing a control of information commerce that's not subject to public recourse.
No, I think you have it wrong. By not keeping it the way it is, they are going to decide who gets what as far as access.
I don't know about that, but they DID listen to the following groups who are members of the Internet Freedom Coalition:
Americans for Prosperity
Americans for Tax Reform
BAMPAC
Catholic Citizenship
Center for Freedom and Prosperity
Center for Individual Freedom
Citizen Outreach
Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives
Cornerstone Policy Research
Council for Citizens Against Government Waste
Ethan Allen Institute
Frontiers of Freedom
Grassroot Institute of Hawaii
Illinois Policy Institute
Independent Women's Forum
Institute for Liberty
Iowa Association of Scholars
Kansas Taxpayers Network
Media Freedom Project
National Taxpayers Union
Ohio Taxpayers Association & OTA Foundation
Public Interest Institute
Reason Foundation
RightMarch.com
TechPolicyWatch.com
Tennessee Center for Policy Research
The Maine Heritage Policy Center
The Scare Ticker
Washington Policy Center
House Republicans are getting tired of the peasants pestering them to keep their promises. They should be content to sit down, shut up, and take whatever crumbs are tossed to them.
Do you have a source that confirms CC's and/or GOA's support of either the Markey Amendment, proposed by Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey and three democrat cosponsors or the Markey's standalone "Network Neutrality Act of 2006" bill?
This is most definitely a partisan issue, supported only by the democrats who naturally want to regulate everything they can.
The term “Network Neutrality” refers to broad, sweeping new regulations on the Internet that would put the government in charge of the structure and pricing of Internet services.Here is a PDF of Markey's "Network Neutrality Act of 2006"These regulations would prohibit cost sharing among network users, thereby forcing all the costs of network service and upgrades onto the end-consumer.
Additionally, forcing all dynamic, emerging Internet networks into the backward model of a “government-regulated utility” will discourage the creation of the networks of the future, and will result in fewer service choices for consumers.
By the way, if a bill is introduced by a democrat from Massachussetts, that is your first clue that it is probably a major-league stinker of a bill.
That's what the moveon.org folks want you to think net neutrality is so they can convince you that this intrusive government regulation of the web is a good idea.
I don't understand. How could someone sue someone else for doing something the government has explicitly refused to criminalize?
In case you missed it, the HOUSE Republicans are the ones that passed a tough immigration reform bill that secures the border and calls for strong enforcement of our immigration laws. Also, the HOUSE Republicans approved oil exploration in ANWR. Also, the HOUSE Republicans have passed further tax cuts and a repeal of the death tax. So I guess you're saying that the peasants are pestering the house republicans to keep those promises to raise taxes, increase regulations, and open up our borders? Funny, I missed hearing all those campaign promises.
I would recommend that instead of falling for the inoccuous sounding term "net neutrality" and buying into the overly simplistic description of the "problem" that this regulation is supposed to correct, you might actually read a little bit about this issue. I have provided a few links, and the Internet Freedom Coalition has an excellent website with numerous resources for more information.
That post is insanely wrong on every level.
It has nothing to do with your individual 1.5 access. It deals with the core not the edge. The addition of video to the internet is goung to cause all sites to slow down to a crawl for everybody. What the ISPs want to do is get additional revenue from high bandwidth content providers to fund add'l capacity and in exchange put their sites on a "fast lane" using DiffServ and other mechanisms. The dems are trying to block the use of Class of Service treatments in the internet.
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