Democrats sneak Net neutrality rules into 'stimulus' bill

The House Democrats' $825 billion legislation released on Thursday was supposedly intended to "stimulate" the economy. Backers claimed that speedy approval was vital because the nation is in "a crisis not seen since the Great Depression" and "the economy is shutting down."

That's the rhetoric. But in reality, Democrats are using the 258-page legislation to sneak Net neutrality rules in through the back door.

The so-called stimulus package hands out billions of dollars in grants for broadband and wireless development, primarily in what are called "unserved" and "underserved" areas. The U.S. Department of Commerce is charged with writing checks-with-many-zeros-on-them to eligible recipients, including telecommunications companies, local and state governments, and even construction companies and other businesses that might be interested.

The catch is that the federal largesse comes with Net neutrality strings attached. The Commerce Department must ensure that the recipients "adhere to" the Federal Communications Commission's 2005 broadband policy statement (PDF)--which the FCC said at the time was advisory and "not enforceable," and has become the subject of a lawsuit before a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

One interpretation of the "adhere to" requirement is that a company like AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast that takes "stimulus" dollars to deploy broadband in, say, Nebraska must abide by these rules nationwide. (It's rather like the state of Nebraska demanding that a broadband provider filter out porn nationwide in exchange for a lucrative government contract.)

In addition, recipients must operate broadband and high-speed wireless networks on an "open access basis." The FCC, soon to be under Democratic control, is charged with deciding what that means. Congress didn't see fit to include a definition.

The Bush administration has taken a dim view of Internet regulations in the form of Net neutrality rules, warning last year that they could "inefficiently skew investment, delay innovation, and diminish consumer welfare, and there is reason to believe that the kinds of broad marketplace restrictions proposed in the name of 'neutrality' would do just that, with respect to the Internet." A report from the Federal Trade Commission reached the same conclusion in 2007.

Posted by Declan McCullagh

In addition, a recent study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says that the absence of Net neutrality laws or similar federally mandated regulations has spurred telecommunications companies to invest heavily in infrastructure, and changing the rules "would have a devastating effect on the U.S. economy, investment, and innovation."

Now, perhaps extensive Net neutrality regulations are wise. But enough people seem to have honest, deep-seated reservations about them to justify a sincere discussion of costs and benefits--rather than having the requirements stealthily injected into what supposed to be an emergency save-the-economy bill scheduled for a floor vote within a week or so.

Net neutrality requirements can, of course, always be imposed retroactively on broadband "stimulus" recipients. As recently as one day ago, a Democratic Senate aide was saying the topic would be addressed in the Judiciary Committee in the near future; there seems little reason to rush to lard up this particular legislation.

But it always seems to happen. Last fall's TARP bailout bill included IRS snooping. A port security bill included Internet gambling restrictions; the Real ID Act was glued onto a military spending and tsunami relief bill; a library filtering law was attached to a destined-to-be-enacted bill funding Congress itself.

It's enough to make you want to force our elected representatives to actually read the bills they pass.

I bet they get the money, strip out the neutrality part, and give companies more ability to ream us.

But I'm not exactly the world's greatest optimist...

Net Neutrality is absolutely essential to having a free internet. Just watch. If we don't get laws supporting Net Neutrality then you will have the web become as commercial and well controlled by the megacorps as is cable TV. The internet is the last bastion of semi-free speech. If this isn't done then you can kiss it goodbye.

If true, then a separate bill should easily stand on it's own merits.

Why the need to 'sneak' it into a completely unrelated piece of legislation?

Yeah man I hear you.

But we both know they have away of giving us something that looks good then they flip it on us in a bad way.

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... uhmmm ... IF Net neutrality is so GOOD and NECESSARY ... why not trumpet the wonderfulness of it's passing? ...
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... naw ... this smells!!! ...
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Very true. If net neutrality isn't maintained, megacorportations will control access and portals. We will only be able to see what they want us to see.
We'll HAVE to logon through Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, etc...

Intermediation on a grand scale that will make AOL seem like kid stuff.

They claim that without such control, we will somehow run out of bandwidth. They want to run the pipelines as video increases over the Internet.

Without net neutrality, little guys like GLP will go bye-bye. Unless they conform, they will either be locked out, or disappear. If they do conform it will be nothing like what we've grown to know and love. Imagine having to watch a commercial every five minutes to stay online. Or constant ads scrolling across the screen. Use your imagination -- what they have in mind is probably much, much worse.

well cut off my legs and call me shorty

Why is it that Net Neutrality "rules" sound suspiciously like Net neutrality limits.....I will have to read more later...sounds suspect to me...the Dems are all over that "Fairness doctrine" which is anything but....

Because a bill on it's own merits doesn't allow too much pork to be slipped in with it? Why are all our laws huge stacks of paper with gobs of unrelated junk?

That's one thing our forefathers messed up on...they should have included a "one law, one vote" provision in the Constitution. It would help to filter the crap, as well as narrow down which congress critters are garbage, and which are simply trash...or something like that.

If you're in congress today, you can vote yes to increase to increase high school funding, and at election time get beat down because that same bill revoked daycare benefits for working parents. If you voted no, you get thrashed because you don't support education.

Fun government we have...

I've been getting e-mails from Republican friends describing net neutrality as evil for years. I ran it past Snopes:

[link to www.snopes.com]

Net neutrality is vital for the Internet to remain the way we know and love it today.

Yeah, raises my BS alarm, too. We'll all be able to have fair access to anything on the internet...but there won't be anything on it but "approved content", on paid sites.

It's a question of regulation vs. self-regulation. Therefore the real question is this, whom do you trust to regulate the Internet: The corporations or the governmnent?

My bad...

Proponents

Proponents of net neutrality include consumer advocates, online companies and some technology companies.[15] Many major Internet application companies are advocates of neutrality, including Google, Yahoo!, Vonage,[16] Ebay, Amazon,[17] IAC/InterActiveCorp and EarthLink.[citation needed] Software giant Microsoft, along with many other companies, has also taken a stance in support of neutrality regulation.[18] Cogent Communications, an international Internet service provider, has made an announcement in favor of certain net neutrality policies.[19] According to Google:
Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days... Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online.
—Guide to Net Neutrality for Google Users[3]

From wikipedia...

[link to en.wikipedia.org]

I don't trust anything the bastards do.

Net Neutrality is not necessarily what it seems...

Hands Off The Internet

[link to www.youtube.com]

LOL

That's pretty much where I'm at.

Something tells me this is the end of free speech.....

Frack the nazi bush administration and may they go to hell and stay there.. Its looking like the dems might actually support free speech. iNteresting.

Kind of cross threading here, but the govt's so good at regulating things, look at how well the UK's handling free speech issues:

Thread: Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive Blacklisted by UK

(UK censors Internet Archive because of claimed kiddie porn issues...they didn't just censor the problematic areas, they killed access to the whole thing - 85 billion pages of archives.)

The corporations already answer to the government - unofficially. When Time-Warner and Sprint balked at removing the support for thousands and thousands of News groups because Cuomo found 88 incidents of child-porn, when they said it was unconstitutional, the Government informed them (informed=threatened) that if they did not comply they bring them up on charges of Fraud, and for every case of "child-porn" (all that is officially included, for now) they found they would go after the ISP and hold them as responsible as the pornographer (even if they never locate the pornographer at all). They quickly folded and joined Verizon (who refuses the government nothing and employs former Homeland Security Officials). In addition to dropping very good, very legit, newsgroups the Three companies also had to donate millions for "technology research" and agree to substantially increase theri amount of "government programming."

Also keep in mind that Verizon has a huge contract with Homeland Security, has been working with Obama for over a year, and has serious connections to Obama's committee team in charge of finding the next FCC Chairman (A few months ago Obama approached the heads of Verizon, At&T and Qwest (whom the government almost destroyd once before) and asked them what they wanted from the next FCC Chairman.

Happens all the fucking time... dumb fucks.

wanted to clarify - they have a long list of things they believe to be obscene - child pornography is simply the one they use to open the door - the one they knew that no one could object to. The legal wording is always quite vague and "open for interpretation" their official list is not - and it's certain to expand even further I'm sure.

No shit, probably because people rarely speak up about it, huh?

Oh well, there goes all of my porn downloading !

But then again there is the INTRANET :)

Neither.

What a shame as the answer will end up being BOTH

Look for this to be the main course at the next G8 Summit.

Nah, you're probably fine. Online porn is a big business, and by some accounts, was key to building the infrastructure we have today.

People were pushing for speed to download crappy adult text games in the late 70s, early 80s saw a push for more speed to get horrible pictures of naked GIF women. 90s got people burning up the lines for JPEGs, and today you can download feature films in a matter of minutes. I expect that to continue till you can replicate your favorite actress/actor (or multiples!) on demand, in the flesh.

Plus, you've got Bill Clinton on your side...

Without net neutrality, the data carriers (like AT&T) will be deciding which web sites and which users get the better bandwidth. The idea is that this ability to blackmail users will allow them to make enough profits to encourage investment in new infrastructure that will make the internet better than ever. Of course, since they will be controlling traffic flow as a matter of business, they could also be able to control the flow for any other reason, say to make a subversive website unusable.

I support net neutrality because I'm pretty impressed with the internet the way it is. I think that any attempt by large corporations to improve the internet would result in a loss of freedom and increased cost to me. They could make me pay a porno surcharge just to look at a few boobies and tell folks it was done to protect children.