Net Neutrality Vote Today

by digby

Seeing The Forest has a list and relevant links to the representatives who can be moved on the Net Neutrality issue that comes to a committee vote today.

Click over and make a couple of calls if you have time. This issue sounds like the most boring thing in the world, but it could result in something quite terrible happening to the internet.

I saw this comment over on Political Animal yesterday that I think illustrates the issue quite well:

What the telecoms are trying to get away with is like this: suppose you ran a business, and your product was delivered by FedEx, with your customers paying FedEx for it. Now suppose FedEx came to you one day and said, “You are making a nice profit off our delivery service. Besides what your customers pay, I also want you to pay us for it, or else your deliveries are going to be a lot slower, if they make it there at all.”

(If only my ISP were as reliable as Fed-ex.)

Basically this is what they are trying to do. They want to shake down the content providers like Google for a piece of their action even though they are already being paid for their service by their customers.

And, of course, once we abandon the idea that ISP’s cannot decide what content to provide we open the door to them deciding they don’t want to provide certain content. Some may very well decide that they don’t like liberal bloggers who use the “f” word. And then where will we be?

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