The Senate Commerce Committee yesterday concluded its marathon 3-day consideration of a broad package of telecommunications reform legislation with an animated debate on the question of Internet neutrality. The bill before the panel featured language to prevent broadband providers from outright blocking of content or applications, but the language does not appear to prevent discriminating among them in terms of speed or service quality. The debate focused on whether to add a nondiscrimination requirement. In the end, the vote deadlocked at 11-11, which meant the nondiscrimination amendment was not added to the bill (a majority vote is required to adopt an amendment).

The debate made several things clear. First, proponents of neutrality legislation are not likely to be satisfied with provisions that simply prevent content from being blocked. Second, neutrality proponents appear sufficiently concerned about this issue to create significant doubts about the bill’s overall prospects in the Senate. Third, the issue is growing increasingly partisan: all of the committee’s 10 Democrats voted to include nondiscrimination language, and 11 of the 12 Republicans (Senator Snowe of Maine was the only exception) voted against it.

CDT’s view, set forth in a recent paper, is that legislation should include some carefully crafted nondiscrimination requirements — but that they should be narrow in scope, leaving network operators free to experiment with a variety of arrangements on the non-Internet portions of their networks. Further serious dialogue between interested parties to this debate could help in developing appropriate language. Unfortunately, much of the public rhetoric around this issue has been misleading, and adding a politically partisan overlay is not likely to help prompt sober and substantive consideration, particularly in the midst of a highly charged election year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Internet Neutrality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.