Congress seems to have ended its involvement in the long-running network-neutrality debate by declaring its own neutrality in the matter.
As my colleague Cecilia Kang reported Wednesday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) gave up on his efforts to pass a net-neutrality bill after failing to get any Republican backing for a compromise he had been crafting.
That should not have surprised anybody. The chances of any bipartisan bills passing have plummeted as we near an election that will probably leave the GOP in a stronger negotiating position- after which those chances should drop to approximately zero.
But the need to make a decision on net neutrality hasn’t disappeared just because our legislative body now finds it too difficult to legislate.
The issue here is simple: Should the government prevent Internet providers from discriminating for or against legitimate sites, services and applications?
That’s not a theoretical risk. Telecommunications firms and some networking experts have argued for the right to charge other sites more for faster delivery of their data or put the brakes on some online uses that they feel clog their networks.
Letting providers charge some sites for access to the passing lane or push the data of others off to the slow lane is not how the Internet was designed to operate, or how Internet service has traditionally been provided.
Continues at: It’s put-up or shut-up time for the FCC’s net-neutrality advocates.
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