Lost in the noise: House committee voted to kill the Internet

(Updated again below)

There has been so much going on lately with plans to nuke Iran and the like, that a major story seems to have slipped under the radar for the entire blogosphere.

We've been jawing for weeks about the plans that Big Telecom have for discriminating between the bits they like and the bits they don't flowing through their pipes into our houses. Last week Matt @ MyDD flagged the very dangerous bill working through the House right now.

That bill took a big step toward being enacted into law last week, and it seems nobody noticed.

A House subcommittee handed phone companies a victory Wednesday by voting 27-4 to advance a bill that would make it easier for them to deliver television service over the Internet and clearing the way for all Internet carriers to charge more for speedier delivery.

The lopsided vote was a defeat for Internet and technology firms like Google and Microsoft, which had hoped to amend the bill to enforce a principle called network neutrality and preserve the status quo under which all Internet traffic is treated equally.

Earlier in the day, the subcommittee voted 23-8 to reject an amendment by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that would have inserted specific language designed to enforce network neutrality and prevent the feared creation of fast and slow lanes on the Internet.

Markey said his amendment was necessary to protect the "Internet as an engine of innovation" and ensure that new services had an equal chance to sprout.
...
Supporters painted defeat of Markey's net neutrality amendment in bleak terms.

"Members from both sides of the aisle endorsed a plan which will permit cable and phone companies to construct 'pay as you surf, pay as you post' toll booths for the Internet," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington.

But Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies for the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, dismissed concerns that the proposed bill would lead to a two-tiered Internet.

"There's plenty of competition," Arrison said. "The market will take care of it."

Ah, yes... the market. Just as the market driven television and radio airwaves have been well-allocated by the market? Just as the oligopolistic and largely bootlicking newspaper industry reflects the market?

Cough, cough (bullshit) cough.

I don't mean to say that the free market is a bad thing. It is a good thing, but it has fatal flaws. Perhaps the biggest one is that in many industries the big just keep getting bigger, and eventually dominate in ways that hurt everyone else. I'll save the economics lesson for another time, but there are industries where, if left alone, the market eventually reduces to no more than a handful of "competitors" who don't actually do much competing.

Telecom is one of those industries. A few players have now bought and paid for enough Congresscritters (and, presumably, Senators) to get what they want, which is unfettered power -- to set prices, of course, and to grow larger, but that ain't all.

There is now an ugly symbiosis between the telecoms and their regulators in Congress. An unfettered, content-neutral Internet has zero direct cost to the telecoms, but muzzling the political rabble certainly won't displease them -- the more you own, the more you tend to value order. On the other hand, we have become a growing thorn in the side of the political establishment, and making it easier for their corporate keepers to keep us out is a high (if unstated) priority. So I have no doubt that, behind closed doors, the ability to shut us up was integral to the game plan.

From the carrier's standpoint, my ones and zeros are no different from Instapundit's ones and zeros, which are no different from Sesamestreet.com's ones and zeros. But mine are the ones with a bullseye painted on them. So it doesn't surprise me that the conservative blogs aren't talking about this. But I am surprised that the left hemiblogosphere isn't making a serious stink about this.

Anyway, six Dems joined the evil Republican majority on this bill in the subcommittee vote. It now goes before the House Energy and Commerce Committeewhere it is expected to be taken up the week of April 24.

We need to get our shit together and make some serious noise about this. We can't afford to lose this fight, or we may not have the tools for the next one.

Update: I cross-posted @ dKos, and it got a ton more comments over there. Several of the commenters there, like Jeff Kaplan here, pointed that a bunch of folks have been paying attention and are taking action. Go here right now and sign up to make your displeasure known. Later tonight I will try to pull together a buch more resources and update this again with more action items.

Use it or lose it, people.

Update #2

OK, friends. This is where the rubber meets to road -- where we protect the real "crown jewel" of our democracy, which is our ability to effectively communicate and participate in it. So do the following:

• Go to freepress.net and send a message through their website.

• Go to commoncause.org and send a message through their website.

• Go to the Center for Digital Democracy, which has collected a bunch more sites and action items.
• Here's the list of members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. If any of them represent you, contact them directly.
  

And as Jane Hamsher would ask, come back and tell me what you have done. The line for gold stars forms to the left.