The tech companies are wading into the fight, gingerly (with eBay as the most effective) writes Matt Stoller. But their pro-Net Neutrality campaign is still dwarfed by AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon’s legislative shopping spree.

The telcos are reportedly spending between ten and fifty million dollars in their campaign to control the Internet. Their ads are splashed across local TV in DC, Maine, Washington State, Wisconsin and other areas of the country. Their money is channeled through phony front groups like Hands off the Internet and TV4US (along with indirect costs, such as money to think tanks) in a campaign to paint Net Neutrality as big, bad government regulation — bad for consumer Joes like you and me.

This deceptive campaign also includes canned telephone appeals and beltway radio spots. These Astroturf pitches fail to mention that every major consumer advocacy group is in our coalition and opposed to the telco cartel on this — or that their real plan is not to free net-users from regulation but to write new laws that clear the way for AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth to seize control of content.

Telco money has bought a lot of support in the House, though less in the Senate. The House telecom bill that’s on deck this week is called the COPE Act. As it’s currently written it eviscerates net neutrality.

It’s now up to the House Committee on Rules to allow an amendment onto the floor that would put meaningful and enforceable Network Neutrality language into the Act. The 13 members that play gatekeepers at Rules are meeting 3:30pm, Wednesday. They could stand a call from you. Tell them that we need the full House to vote on Net Neutrality. Every representative’s stance on the future of the Internet should be put on the record.

(To that end, SavetheInternet.com members sent this letter today)

If Rules allows Net Neutrality to the floor, we expect a full House vote as early as Friday.

The House fight is in its final throes. After this week, the Net Neutrality debate will shift to the Senate, where we have good momentum behind a bipartisan bill offered by Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota).

Stay tuned.

The constant refrain of the Astroturf groups like Mike McCurry’s “Hands Off the Internet” is that Network Neutrality is a solution in search of a problem:

“We have no clear evidence that content is being discriminated against and we have no real problem with quality of service that cannot be addressed under current law. We think the advocates of regulated net neutrality have not pointed to a problem that needs a solution.”

– Mike McCurry, Wall Street Journal, May 24

The Truth: Telco-funded lobbyists like McCurry frequently cite the absence of numerous examples of blocking or degradation to back their argument. This is a red herring.

There are multiple real-world instances of blocking and impairment. But there are good reasons why we haven’t yet witnessed a full-blown epidemic. Until very recently Net Neutrality has been the operating principle of the Internet — when telco front groups like “Hands Off” repeat that rhetoric, they merely reinforce our point.

All this changed last year. In August 2005, the FCC put the largest phone companies under a year-long moratorium that prohibits them from violating Net Neutrality. This FCC ruling will lift at the end of this summer. Without Congress taking action to make Net Neutrality the law, the path will open for rampant discrimination.

Until then — and because we are in the midst of a hotly contested legislative debate — companies like AT&T and Verizon are trying to be on their best behavior. This would soon change without Net Neutrality.

By far the most significant evidence regarding the network owners’ plans to discriminate is their stated intent to do so:

• William Smith of BellSouth: “[Smith] told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc. Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth’s offering.” (Washington Post, December 1)
• Edward Whitacre of AT&T: “Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?” (Business Week, November 7)

Network Neutrality advocates are not imagining a doomsday scenario. We are taking the telecom execs at their word.

To learn more, read the “Facts and Fictions” report by Free Press, Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America. Or visit the other Lies of the Week:

Big Lie of the Week: No. 2

Big Lie of the Week: No. 1

The telephone and cable companies have been going all out in Washington to smooth their way for control of the Internet by proposing what appears at first to be a reasonable policy, which, on further review, doesn’t hold up.

In a commentary at TPM Cafe, Art Brodsky — the communications director for SavetheInternet.com member group Public Knowledge — compares the phone and cable lobbying on Net Neutrality to a metaphor called “boiling the frog.” According to Brodsky, it goes something like this:

If you throw a frog into boiling water, it will jump out. But if you put a frog in warm water, and gradually raise the temperature, it will become acclimated, until it becomes cooked. Gross, but accurate. This is what the telephone companies and their allies who sell them equipment are doing.

The legislation on next week’s menu is the COPE Act — a House bill that has been gift wrapped for AT&T and Verizon.

With this bill, Brodsky writes, the telco cartel is trying to woo Congress into believing that its intentions are good — when in reality it seeks to gain complete Internet control through an access tiering scheme that returns massive profits at the expense of Internet freedom:

When the telephone or cable company picks what goes onto a network, the telephone or cable company, not the customer, and not the company the customer might want to reach, is in charge. The telephone and cable company will do what they can to improve their new toll road. And today’s Internet? Wouldn’t be as attractive in the future, would it, if companies feel they have to pay extra for “special arrangements” or be left behind.

What the telephone and cable companies are saying, is “trust us” not to disrupt the Internet. They, after all, are in the transmission business. But “trust us” only goes so far, particularly when we look at other parts of the world and see how far behind our telephone and cable companies have left us.

Compared with other developed nations the U.S. has fallen from 3rd to 16th in broadband penetration per capita, far behind countries like Canada, South Korea and Japan. The United States also numbers 16th in terms of broadband growth rates, suggesting our world ranking won’t improve any time soon.

But that’s only the half of it. Recent Free Press analysis of the “low-priced” introductory broadband offers by companies like AT&T and Verizon reveal them to be little more than bait-and-switch gimmicks. On a per megabit basis, U.S. consumers pay 10 to 25 times more than broadband users in Japan.

The reason for the Broadband price gouging? According to Free Press’ Derek Turner, it’s due to an industry-friendly regulatory regime that gave the cable/telco duopoly control of the broadband marketplace:

The “fierce competition” among broadband platforms is seriously overstated. The FCC’s own report shows that satellite and wireless broadband continue to lose market share. Today, cable and DSL providers control almost 98 percent of the residential and small-business broadband market.

No competition means no fair pricing. As Brodsky also points out, this could become worse by regulations that allow telephone companies not to have to share their broadband networks with competitors on the theory that they will invest in the network.

But, so far, their alleged investment in broadband infrastructure has left us far behind the most developed nations.

And now they’re urging Congress to extend more favors by killing Net Neutrality — the only safeguard that stands in the way of total Internet dominance by the telephone and cable companies.

The cartel has turned the heat up another notch in Washington. Unless Congress takes action on behalf of those who elected them, we’ll all get cooked.