Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explained why he voted against the amendment and gave an amazing primer on how the internet works.
Just read it. You’ll learn something, though not what you might expect.
Just to be clear, below the fold is a rundown of some of the positions people are taking on this.
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Open Road Advocates
Michael Copps, Commissioner, FCC
”Our open and vibrant and freewheeling Internet is to me the last place on earth where we should tolerate gatekeeper controls… [the Web] wasn’t built to be that way.”
Ben Scott, Policy Director, Free Press
“If you change the way the Internet operates, then those customers are going to show up to Congress with pitchforks. They’re going to be asking, ‘Why is it that our Internet, which used to be a free and open platform, now has a fast lane and a dirt road?”Jeff Chester, Founder, Center for Digital Democracy
“An Internet without open access requirements would hardly resemble the Internet as we know it today. Without such requirements, the power to discriminate would be given to those who control the conduit—the few gigantic service providers that will remain.”Lawrence Lessig, Law Professor, Stanford
“When the Internet first reached beyond research facilities to the masses, it did so on regulated lines — telephone lines. “Had the telephone companies been free of the ‘heavy hand’ of government regulation, it’s quite clear what they would have done — they would have killed it.”Mark Cooper, Research Director, Consumer Federation of America
“The next Google won’t be able to pay this freight so that they will literally strangle the flow of information that has been the lifeblood of the Internet … You can’t have the big corporations that own the wires decide who gets what.”Gigi B. Sohn, President, Public Knowledge
”Prioritization is just another word for degrading your competitor,” Sohn said. “If we want to ruin the Internet, we’ll turn it into a cable TV system” that carries programming from only those who pay the cable operators for transmission.
Jeffrey Citron, CEO, Vonage
“They want to charge us for the bandwidth the customer has already paid for.” Customers who already pay a premium for high-speed Internet access, he said, will end up paying even more if online services pass the new access charges to consumers. “The customer has to pay twice. That’s crazy.”Michael Geist, Research Chair, University of Ottawa
“While prioritizing websites or applications may hold some economic promise, the lack of broadband competition and insufficient transparency surrounding these actions will rightly lead to growing calls for regulatory reform that grants legal protection for the principle of network neutrality.”Vinton Cerf, “Father of the Internet”
Computer networking pioneer Cerf asked Congress to rethink any legislation that would not contain tough neutrality provisions.”This bill would do great damage to the Internet as we know it … Telephone companies cannot tell consumers who they can call; network operators should not dictate what people can do online.”The Gatekeepers
Ed Whitacre, Chairman and CEO, AT&T
”Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using … Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes free is nuts.”
Bill Smith, CTO, BellSouth
Smith justified charging companies for content by saying they are using the telco’s network without paying for it. “Higher usage for broadband services drives more costs that we have to recover,” he said on January 16. “It’s the shipping business of the digital age.”Thomas Tauke, Executive VP of Communications, Verizon
“In order to earn a return on the huge investments in innovation we are making advanced networks from which many other customers have gained. We must be able to offer our consumers the innovative services and the integrated solutions that provide greater convenience, control, and security. This means, for example, stand-alone offerings of VoIP services, like our Voice Wing services. It means video.”Ivan Seidenberg, CEO, Verizon Communications
While Seidenberg said Verizon “intuitively” believes that the Internet should be open to all, he also said that “we need to make sure there is the right economic model,” especially in regards to so-called “free” applications. “We have to make sure they don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity. We need to pay for the pipe.”Adam Thierer, Senior Fellow, Progress and Freedom Foundation **
The marketplace and not Congress should take care of any discriminatory policies that broadband providers implement, Thierer told the Industry Standard in 2004. “What could be a better impetus of getting another carrier in there than an incumbent carrier playing games like that? Consumers will demand openness, and carriers who don’t provide it will lose money.”
Jeff Batcher, Spokesman, BellSouth
“During the hurricanes, Google didn’t pay to have the DSL restored,” Batcher argued to justify charging extra fees for bandwidth. “We’re paying all that money.” To which Internet reporter Om Malik responded, “If you charge people about $75 a month, or about $825 a year for DSL and phone service, it is your job to fix the line.”