AT&T is pining for the days when they could charge 28 cents a minute, 8am-5pm, Mon-Fri, 22 cents a minute 5pm-11pm, Mon-Fri, and 16 cents a minute 11pm-8am Mon-Fri and 11pm Fri-5pm Sun., for calls within the United States.

Those were their glory days, now they want to screw the consumer of internet services! Could Bernie Ebbers or Kenny Boy take over At&T so they disappear?

Hmm, will it be possible to say, use satellite services from European companies?

No, because you would need geostationary satellites, and the ones European companies have are be positioned over Europe.

However, a combination of WiFi and satellites is technically feasible, completely bypassing land line based providers. If AT&T has its way, this might well become a viable business proposition.

Another example of the incompetence of the tech companies when it comes to lobbying Congress and the FCC.

Meg Whitman was asked a question about net neutrality in the EBAY 1Q earnings release call and her answer was "we are monitoring the situation."

This is pathetic. Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, Ebay, IAC, Dell, and HP together should have more influence than VZ and AT&T. But they just dont know how to play the game as well. When they wake up it will be too late for them and too late for America. We will continue to fall behind in next generation access technologies, and the rate of innovation and productivity growth will suffer.

Mary from RI:

The Internet has become an important tool for progressives--note how political television is wholly in the pocket of the status quo and the corporations, while the crippling defeat that's about to be handed to the Republican party in '06 will owe a debt to the left-wing Internet. This has a lot to do with the medium.

Look around you. There are a number of people who fight to keep these things free and open, and you should be grateful for their work.

If you can't accept that, or just wish to stroke your ego, take your bitter tone elsewhere.

Mary From RI,

I thought you had been banned. You use multiple accounts to pretend to engage in two way conversations that no true liberal would ever have.

I don't know if you are some deranged freak or a paid GOP operative. Either way your input here borders on absurd...but I guess that is your point.

their fellow citizens could be slipping between the cracks out there and they wouldn't notice, but gosh darn it.. "the internet might be sold.. the sky is falling!!!" Frankly, when it comes to priorities, that falls dead last to me and I'll wager the majority of Americans out there..

Mary, this comment strikes me as especially short-sited. What it especially fails to see is how legislation like this will impact the poor down the line. Admittedly, net neurality is not poor peoples' primary concern right now. Nor, probably, should it be. But do you really want to suggest that access to telephones is not important? Consider not being able to call 911, for example.

Legislators in the early days of telephony had to make similar choices. Some were good, some were bad, but who gets to talk on which telephone lines for what prices today and the insurance that a call to 911 from any telephone in the US will reach an emergency service are the results of major choices made in the Communications Act of 1934 (choices based, in many cases, on the "common carrier" model of the railroads).

Without getting into the details, the point is that today's legislation structures tomorrow's access-picture. If you care about tomorrow's poor as much as you care about today's - and however many green leafy vegetables are available, there will still be poor people in the future - I think this issue should rise in your priorities.

This is merely another case of selling out to the highest bidder. This theme is the common denominator of all that Congress does and is derived of the morally corrupt scheme that is our electoral process. Anyone who thinks this country is about the citizens, freedom, integrity or other arcane concept is living a fantasy. The words of all of our politicians are meaningless. We must judge their performance and cast our votes only upon the results. No excuses and no spinning allowed.

thepeoplechoose

I don't know if you are some deranged freak or a paid GOP operative.

In cases like this, always - always! - assume they're paid GOP operatives.

There is no bill number at the moment. It is technically a "committee print" with the title, "Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006." That's how it will be considered in the House Energy and Commerce Committee markup.

When it gets to the House floor in another week or so, it will have a formal bill number.

Just imagine internet service in red america: jesusnet.com, homeshopping.com, porn.com.

Art's got it right. Here's some more info. Also known as the Barton bill, this bill would remove the system of local and state awards of franchises for video services and replace it with a national system administered by the FCC. This is a sweetheart deal that would allow the belcos (AT&T and Verizon) to compete with the cablecos without having to go through the existing process of negotiating a license with the local franchise authority. Existing cable licenses could use this national franchise model to renew when their current license expires.

It's important to note that under such a federally issued franchise, video services providers would *not* be required to provide service to 100% of their franchise area - there are no build-out requirements, even over a set number of years, as there are with current cable franchises. Thus, providers would be allowed to "cherry pick" some areas, ignore others, and price service areas differentially.

Because this legislation removes control from states and municipalities, it is opposed by groups such as the US Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities, and the National Assoc. of Telecommunications Officers and Administrators (NATOA). A lot of useful info on this can be found at www.natoa.org - follow the link to policy. If you want to help defeat this bill, it's not enough to just write your congressmen - have your municipal and state elected official contact your congressmen and senators, as well. There are Op-Eds showing up all over the place - NATOA has examples. See if you can get one placed in your local paper.

Finally, note that this legislation would be devastating for local public, educational and governmental access channels. While it's true that new providers would have to carry any pre-exisiting access channels, the formual for providing support for those channels, and for allowing for bandwidth increases to keep up with increasing demand and technical abilities (VOD, for example) are completely inadequate.

Don't know if that comment about "what's the fuss about" was a troll or not. But this choking off of the public's ability to use these media to communicate is a grave threat about which all who care about the quality and responsiveness of our government should be highly alarmed - no matter what your urgent concerns are, foreign or domestic.

For more on the threats to PEG access this bill presents, see www.saveaccess.org and www.alliiancecm.org.

Seems like this will get through the House. Contact your senators, too. Ask them to support the Inouye-Burns principles for local control (not the Ensign-McCain principles) - these too can be found at natoa.org

~Rob

What impact will wireless delivery of internet content have on this issue? "Wired" argued that the key to the growth of the Internet was the breakup of the old AT&T, because AT&T would never had the incentive to do the buildout necessary.
Are there competitors like Vonage etc who might under price the Verizons and the like?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

The telcos have never liked the internet. In the late 1980's, primarily at the instigation of IT&T, the International Standards Organization (ISO) began drafting the "Open Systems Interconnect" (OSI), and standardized it as ISO 7498-1 in 1994. Buried in the details of the networking protocols was a teleco-centric model of communications. Fortunately, the folks developing the internet just yawned or snickered and kept on doing their own thing.

A standard is just a worthless piece of paper if no one bothers to adher to it. So having lost in the marketplace of ideas, the telcos are getting their paid muscle in Congress to turn their view of the world into law.

savetheinternet.com cites cases of Canadian telcos blocking sites they don't like, and charging extra to use competitors' sevices. Now, blocking sites in America would likely generate a backlash if it was done indiscriminately. But sites could be blocked temporarily at critical times, as the R's jammed Democratic phone banks during an election day. At the extreme, the example of China's restrictions on internet content should be sufficient warning against allowing a few special interests to control information flow.

it used to be that law enforcement had to search for evil doers.
now everyone reports upon themselves via the internet. but can we be sure why a person visited a porn site or site that describes the proper way in which to build a bomb?

The full committee will be hearing this bill this coming week. From the Committee on Energy and Commerce website:
(http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Markups/04252006markup1848.htm)

The Full Committee will meet in OPEN MARKUP SESSION on Tuesday, April 25, and Wednesday, April 26, 2006, in 2123 Rayburn House Office Building, to consider H.R. ____, a Committee Print on the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006, as reported by the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. On Tuesday, April 25, 2006, the Committee will convene at 5:00 p.m. for the purpose of opening statements. The Committee will reconvene on Wednesday, April 26, 2006, at 10:00 a.m.

I look forward to the day when the GOP website comes through at blazing fast speed, while i will get 404 errors and slow connections to al jazeera, talking points memo, the Democratic party website, move on, etc...

A Bi-partisan online coalition has formed, which includes folks like Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, Lawrence Lessig, Timothy Wu and Vint Cerf, known as the father of the internet and the Gun Owners of America. There is an excellent video here that explains 'net neutrality' very simply. Feel free to join the coalition here.

Nope, it's worse than that. AT&T doesn't care about charging higher rates to you or your ISP, what they want is to charge higher rates to eBay. Or Amazon. Or Google. Or Yahoo. Or baybe TPM. If the people providing content don't pay AT&T extra, their packets answering web-site requests just might happen to get dropped on the floor. Business is business, y'know. And if Amazon signs on as AT&T's official book/music/everything store, well, then, that's just too bad for competitors who want their sites to deliver the same level of responsiveness.

The commercial antitrust implications of this kind of discrimination are enough to make it violently against the public interest. But consider what happens on the political side when, say, only the best-funded sources of news and opinion can be sure their messages will be reliably available to people who want them. Once the infrastructure for discrimination is in place, setting up the Fox News version of the internet would be easy to do, hard to detect and prove.