109th Congress reaches Net neutrality stalemate

If you follow tech politics at all, the phrase "Net neutrality" has probably been on your radar quite a bit during the last year. For those of you who aren't familiar, Net neutrality is the idea that the job of the network should be only to move data, not to prioritize or regulate it. Major corporations and telecom companies have recently made it known that they would like to start prioritizing traffic over their networks. While it remains unclear exactly what this means for the consumer, one can imagine everything from corporate sites loading faster than other pages on the Internet to losing bandwidth on your connection so that your provider can prioritize traffic for premium services (VoIP, digital cable, premium Internet access, etc.). Net neutrality activists say that if the telecoms are allowed to regulate traffic on their networks in such a manner, "the guiding principle that preserves the free and open Internet" (as SavetheInternet.com puts it) will be lost.

For that reason, neutrality activists believe that the U.S. government must pass some form of legislation to prevent service providers from creating a tiered Internet. During the past year, telecom companies like Verizon and Comcast have lobbied heavily against Net neutrality legislation while major Internet companies like eBay and Google have lobbied for it. Proponents of neutrality in Congress have attempted to add a neutrality provision to the newest version of the Telecommunications Act. However, opponents attempted to pass a rival version of the Act (written in part by Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who you might know as that guy who claimed that the Internet is "a series of tubes"), which stalled in the Senate. The latest news is that the latter bill has essentially died with the end of the 109th Congress and will have to be reintroduced during the next session, a proposition that seems increasingly unlikely. Net neutrality activists are optimistic, claiming that the 110th Congress will be more neutrality friendly and may pass a version of the Act containing the provision.

For more on Net neutrality:
- see this Ars Technica article
- or this CNET article