Net Neutrality backers claim momentum

The grassroots forces behind Net neutrality are making sure the issue is not going away. In two hearings tomorrow in Congress, the coalition of consumer groups, higher education organizations, special interest organizations and Internet companies will try to convince Congress that market forces are not enough to protect consumers when the market is a duopoly.

In a teleconference today intended to preview the debate taking place tomorrow in both the House and Senate, the Net Neutrality Coalition refuted claims that the push for laws that prohibit discriminatory treatment of content by telcos and cable companies serves primarily the commercial interests Google and others to gain cheaper access to broadband pipes for their own video services. Coalition members repeatedly stated their fears that a duopoly of telco-cable broadband access will transform the wide-open Internet into a closed environment similar to today’s cable TV networks.

The House Judiciary Committee will be engaged in the markup of the Sensenbrenner-Conyers Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006, while the Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on Net Neutrality, involving measure both from Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and a strongly pro-Net Neutrality bill sponsored by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.).

One of the primary purposes of the teleconference, however, was to stress the need to slow down the passage of telecom reform legislation to allow what organizers say is growing grassroots support for Net Neutrality to influence votes in Congress.

That grassroots effort includes 700,000 names on a petition gathered by the Savetheinternet.com Coalition, said Craig Aaron of Free Press, a national, nonpartisan media reform and Internet policy group.

“When the public finds out about what is being done in Washington, they have a lot to say about it,” he said.

The recent introduction of the Snowe-Dorgan measure and the Sensenbrenner-Conyers bill are indications that the Net Neutrality movement is gaining steam, claimed Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, a Beltway advocacy group.

“What has been going on the last couple of weeks with introductions of bills, and huge numbers of grassroots groups starting to get involved is an example of what can happen when policy makers have a chance to really think about it, when they are not pushed by telcos to push a bill” too quickly,” she said. “We don’t want a duopoly to control the Internet experience. Do we want the on-ramps to the Internet to be open to anybody without cost or do we want the cable model where the cable company picks and chooses what people want to see? The dangers will really come out. It is time to educate more policymakers.”

The groups involved in the Net Neutrality Coalition also refuted telephone company claims that prohibiting tiered service offerings will deny them the opportunity to earn a return on their multibillion-dollar investment in broadband networks.

“If we have time, Congress will listen to the opposition,” said Wendy Wigen of Educause, a non-profit organization promoting IT technology in the higher education community. The real issue, she added, is whether competition really exists in broadband access.

“The role of government is to step in when the market fails,” Wigen said. “Statistics play out and when the FCC puts out a report that says 94% of Americans have two or fewer choices for broadband access, there is a problem with the free market on access to the Internet. Do we need regulation or don’t we--the numbers prove that true competition for fiber lines to the home is a long way off.”

Net neutrality isn’t intended to protect Google’s right to offer video streaming, but to aid other smaller companies who don’t have Google’s market-power, said Bill McClellan of the Electronic Retailing Association. “It’s the small guys from around the country and small communities that are affected,” he said.

Nor does Net neutrality affect the Bell companies’ ability to build private IP networks to deliver their own video services, or to use policy-management to prioritize service delivery over IP networks, said Earl Comstock, president of Comptel, the lobbying organization for competitive carriers.

“It would stop them from doing discriminatory policy-based routing,” he said. “If they treat all video packets the same, there’s no issue. The problem we have is when they cross-subsidize their provision of content by charging us more than they charge themselves. Nobody is stopping them from transmitting over their own private networks. But that incents them to strange the capacity that is available for everybody to use because if that capacity is big enough, there will be competing video service providers. They want to choke the public bandwidth to protect the value of their premium video service.”

Alan Davidson, Washington policy counsel for Google, said telco claims that there is an Internet bandwidth crunch also are untrue.

“The notion that they are in some quality of service crisis is fiction,” he said. “The Internet has functioned very well without any discriminatory routing by carriers so far.”