Tuesday, November 14, 2006

A Renewed Push For Net Neutrality

The following guest entry was written by Timothy Karr, campaign director of Free Press and the Savetheinternet.com Coalition.

In the coming weeks, major communications companies and their high-spending lobbyists will do everything they can to dismiss last week's political result and reassert their control over the business of policymaking. But what happened on Tuesday has much deeper ramifications for phone and cable efforts to set the agenda.

On the issue of network neutrality, companies like AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and Comcast outspent public-interest advocates on a scale of 500 to one -- pushing Congress to remove the longstanding nondiscrimination rules that enabled the Internet to become the greatest vehicle for free speech and economic innovation. To do away with these freedoms, the phone and cable lobby will continue to paint issues like Net Neutrality as "unnecessary government regulations" and dismiss the groundswell of public support for this issue as the handiwork of a few "liberal groups."

The public tolerance for this type of "astroturfing" was tested in 2006. More than 75 percent of respondents to a September CBS/New York Time poll thought that most members of Congress "are more interested in serving special interest groups" than "serving the people they represent." As much as anything, last week's vote sent a message to Congress to stop currying favor with moneyed interests and return to governing in the public interest.

Near the top of this new agenda will be restoring net neutrality. Many in Congress came to this realization after receiving more than a million letters from concerned citizens urging them to maintain a free and open Internet. Whereas before, the phone companies had been confident that Congress would simply sign-off on industry-written legislation, today no member of Congress can vote with the telecom cartel without feeling the full heat of public scrutiny.