Senator Ted Stevens, the Republican Chairman of the Commerce Committee explains why we shouldn’t (audio link):

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn’t going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially […]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time. [?]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Thanks for that succinct explaination, Mr. Stevens. I’ll sleep better knowing that the Commerce Committe and it’s tech-savvy Chairman are on the job, protecting us against the dangerous filling of the internet tubes.

An unfortunate reality of the Net Neutrality debate is the Telecom Industry spending millions of dollars on a misinformation campaign aimed at people who don’t have a basic understanding of how the internet works. Sadly, a large portion of that campaign is dedicated to lobbying Senators to support their cause.

I fully understand that no Senator is going to be an expert on every issue they vote on, but one would think that when it comes to key pieces of legislation that can have sweeping (and unintended) consequences, they would at least take the step of making sure their staffers gave them the cliff notes on what’s going on so they don’t sound like a fool.

If you cut through all of the nonsense and misinformation this isn’t about capacity, or even regulation. This is about VoIP companies like Vonage and Skype eating into profit margins, and the Telecom Industry wanting a piece of their action through what amounts to extortion, whlie trying to kill competition that they feel is using their infrastructure to compete with them.

However, this isn’t about pricing either. If they wanted to charge more for bandwidth, they could. Nothing is stopping them. They create their own pricing models, and companies which use more bandwidth such as Google or Microsoft pay a premium to ensure their sites run fast and keep up with demand.

The Telecom Industry however, doesn’t believe that’s enough. They want to be able to prioritize content; to have a tiered system where they decide which content is allowed into the fast lane, and which content is relegated to the slow one. To use a less technical analogy:

You buy a car (internet service) from the car dealership (your ISP). The car has a “top speed” of 65 mph. Except it will only allow you to do 65 mph on the way to the dealership and it’s subsidiaries — anywhere else, like the grocery store, blockbuster, etc., you can only go 45 mph.

That’s not the worst of it, though. Without protections that ensure all data is treated equally, these companies could censor websites they dont like, blocking access to competitors or websites that speak out on this very issue. That could mean the downfall of the Internet as a tool of political expression, and all but kill the rise of blogs. This isn’t speculation, companies have taken these actions when there is no protection in place.

They could even decide to turn the Internet’s format into something more akin to Cable or Satellite television, where you would be required to purchase packages to access “groups” of websites rather than being allowed to go to the websites you want to now, having the freedom of choice.

Now, one of the main arguements against legislation is that the ‘free market’ should decide. I like the free market. I think it’s a fantastic solution to a lot of problems, but not this one. Why? Because a free market doesn’t exist in the industry. The Telecom Industry owns the vast majority (98%) of the infrastructure, and virtually all of the last mile infrastructure (the lines that connect to your house, or your business).

It’s not as simple as new and pro-net-neutrality companies starting up, and creating new infrastructure. Not only would it take years, but in many cases the red tape and the lobby against competition (as can be seen with net neutrality) are strong enough to deny entry into the market at all.

The bottom line is that the Internet as we know it today is at risk of being destroyed in the name of corporate profit greed.

Get involved and make sure your Senators know where you stand on the issue.

A list of Senators and their positions can be found here. A call can be placed to the main switchboard ( 1-888-355-3588 ), and they’ll transfer you to any office you request, free of charge.