Coalition Sounds Off on Net Neutrality Legislation
 

[i]Vint Cerf, so-called "father" of the Internet, is among the big names and organizations that have come together to create the SavetheInternet.com Coalition, which hosted a national conference call today.

Other members of the Coalition include Gun Owners of America, Craigslist.com, Public Knowledge, MoveOn.org, the American Library Association, Afro-Netizen.com, the Consumer Federation of America, the Consumers Union, and Free Press.

Today's conference call is one of the coalition's many campaign tactics to emphasize the importance of "Net neutrality," the concept of a free and open Internet.

"The fight for Internet freedom is now being waged in earnest," said Tim Karr, campaign director for Free Press. "On one side you have the public and on the other side the nation's largest phone and cable companies looking to strip the Net of neutrality."

The "fight" that Karr refers to, and the purpose of the Campaign, is to address what equates to a Congressional re-write of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, in a bid to update it to include Internet-related activities.

"The last decade of Internet revolution has been marked by innovation, which was the consequence of the open and neutral access that the Internet has afforded until now," said Cerf, who serves as the chief Internet evangelist at Google, during the conference call. "Proposals coming from telcos and the cable companies, as exemplified in some of their legislation, destroys that neutrality."

The updated bill, dubbed "Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancements Act of 2006" is sponsored by Representative and House Commerce Chairman Joe Barton (R-Texas), Representative and Chairman of Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Representative Charles Pickering (R-Miss.), and Representative Bobby Rush (D-Ill.). The bill is focused on video-franchise reform and was first introduced to Congress in late March 2006.

It would, among other things, grant telcos and cable operators automatically renewing national franchises to deliver video services over the Internet, and would grant the FCC authority over Net neutrality-related issues. The CEA and US Telecom are among a number of groups showing public support for the bill.

On the opposing side, the coalition is concerned over the lack of protections for Network neutrality. The bill includes policies related to Internet freedom, "however, those policies are subject to the whims of future administrations—what we need is established network neutrality," said GiGi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge, during the conference call.

The Coalition is not alone in voicing such concerns, as evident by a statement issued jointly by Amazon, Google, eBay, InteractiveCorp., Microsoft, and Google, at a Senate hearing.

"We are extremely concerned that legislation before your Committee would fail to protect the Internet from discrimination and would deny consumers unfettered access to the tremendous scope of content, applications, and services that are available today on the Internet and will be deployed in the future," they said.

The proposals being heard this week on Capitol Hill, as part of the new telecommunications policy, come mainly from telcos and cable companies, according to some Coalition members. The legislation, "as it reads today," would not give content providers equal access to consumers on the other end of the network.

"Whenever you see groups on the far left and the far right joining together over what Congress is getting ready to do, it's my experience that whatever Congress is getting ready to do is generally unconstitutional," said Craig Fields, Director of Internet Operations for Gun Owners of America.

The Coalition is looking to achieve a "simple principle" that disallows network providers from discriminating against smaller, independent companies and favoring the content they own or are financially vested in.

*snip*

More information can be found here...

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

The bottom line as summed up in the article and on the site is this:

The bush administration wants two things:

1. Telcos to regulate the net, say which sites get how much bandwidth, and who gets access to what, on the entire internet.

2. The FCC to regulate the content on the internet and say whats 'decent' or 'indecent'


Anyone else take issue with this?