Net neutrality: some good news, more bad

As you have probably already heard (I'm a bit late reporting this), net neutrality lost yesterday in the Senate Committee -- 11 to 11. Kos has pointed me to a report by Matt Stoller at MyDD on what happened:

Yesterday's events threw a lot of pieces into place for a hardened opposition to this bill. While telco lobbyists were probably celebrating last night's passage of the bill through the Commerce Committee and the failure of the net neutrality amendment, today the landscape is probably making them a lot less sanguine about their prospects. They won the Committee vote, but lost a lot of ground.

The Committee's audio servers were overloaded so I couldn't listen to the hearings. From what I'm told, here's how it went down. The scene in the room was surreal, with Senators debating in front of a room full of Blackberry-armed lobbyists. There were aides behind the Senators who would pass their bosses arguments and information, with the lobbyists passing arguments and information to the aides based on the arguments Senators were making. There were over 50 Bell lobbyists alone, including 12 employees of Verizon. Some Senators were simply proxies for lobbyists to argue through. Lunatic arguments were apparently in vogue; Senator Demint said that he couldn't understand why the broadband market wasn't considered competitive. In a few years, he asserted, there would be as many broadband providers as there are search engines on the internet. Stevens was angry and ranting, pushing aggressively to get his bill through the Committee. He ultimately succeeded, but rubbed the Senators so raw that he now realizes that this bill cannot make it through the floor in its current shape.

In terms of the committee members, all of the Dems stood by net neutrality, including Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, and Mark Pryor. George Allen was sitting on the fence, visibly uncomfortable, and undecided until the last minute. John McCain left his vote with a staff by proxy, and wasn't there for most of the hearings. Always the showboater, he came in only to offer his own amendment, and for final passage of the bill. His own amendment was a pet issue of the Christian right, a la carte cable TV, which was destroyed by 20-2. He also voted against net neutrality and for passage of the final bill, per his orders from the Republican establishment. John McCain 2008 showed up, not maverick McCain. Quel surprise.

When the vote came, we held on for an 11-11 tie, keeping all the Democrats. I'm as critical of the Democratic Party as you'll find among liberal bloggers, but I have to acknowledge that the Democrats on the Commerce Committee (except for Inouye) were exceptional and just hung in there. I am very much learning that having votes in there matters a great deal, and that these people are under extraordinary pressure to do the wrong thing.

John Kerry was the major surprise in the hearings. Ted Stevens was deeply angry about the bill, and said at one point that the net neutrality provision was a poison pill that would prevent the larger telecom reform bill from passing. "If we include net neutrality in the bill, we won't have 60 votes to pass the bill", he said, to which John Kerry responded with something along the lines of "If you don't put net neutrality in the bill, you won't have 60 votes to pass the bill either." Ouch. This was vintage kickass Kerry, the Kerry that showed up for the debates in 2004.

Bill Nelson of Florida was another happy surprise. He has spent the last 6 months flirting with John Ensign, and is a big fan of video franchising. Not only did he vote correctly on net neutrality, but he prevented Stevens from holding the vote before he could make his strongly worded statement. In his statement, he said he really wants national video franchising, he thinks that this legislation is very important, and he's worked to pass it. But, he is now convinced that without network neutrality and without effective cable build-out provisions, he could not support it.

Frankly, I'm afraid this is a bit optimistic, given the lopsided vote against net neutrality in the House.

Lest you haven't been keeping up on this, net neutrality is the idea that the major carriers of network data on the net (the telcoms for the most part) should not have the right to charge content suppliers differentially. What is likely to happen without it is that they will give preferential access to the big guys who are willing to pay big bucks to monopolize access to the net, and the little guys like Scatablog will be given slow pipes that no one will want to deal with.

I've dealt with the telco lobbies professionally before -- sometimes pro, sometimes con -- they are the big boys in the business, and it's very hard to stop them from steamrolling things through. Just look at how they convinced Clinton and Gore to push for the telecom act back in Clinton's time. That was one of the worst bills ever to become law.