Net neutrality: Unpleasant update

The big carriers--the cable and telco operators who never wanted the internet in its present form, where services, content, and user voices can spring up like wildflowers--are prepping another assault on net neutrality.

Here's an excerpt from Rep. Ed Markey's opening statement on the telecommunications bill making its way through the House:

Tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of thousands of American businesses use and rely upon the Internet every day. In addition to its vital economic role, the Internet is also an unparalleled vehicle for open communications by non-commercial users, for religious speech, for civic involvement, and our First Amendment freedoms.

The reason why the Internet is so revered as a medium and prized as an engine for innovation and entrepreneurial entry is that it is open to all comers. It is this very openness that allows Americans to access the content and services they want, and not just the content and services that some broadband baron has chosen for them. The fundamental truth about the Internet is that no one owns it. The Internet is the type of disruptive technology that Josef Schumpeter talked about as being indispensable to our capitalist system. Schumpeter said that "without innovation, no entrepreneurs, without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist returns."

Yet the Internet is at endangered because of the misguided provisions of the bill before us, which put at grave risk the Internet as an engine of innovation, job creation, and economic growth. The bill permits the imposition of new fees, or "broadband bottleneck taxes" for Internet sites to access high-bandwidth consumers. This will stifle openness, endanger our global competitiveness, and warp the web into a tiered Internet of bandwidth haves and have-nots. It is the introduction of creeping Internet protectionism into the free and open World Wide Web.

Read the rest of Markey's statement for a fuller list of the consumer and civic horrors--and the corporate reach-arounds--built into this newiest piece of legislation. Common Cause has a good information site going, too.

As MyDD writes, "The right-wing used to be against regulation; as it turns out, they just want to privatize who gets to regulate."