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Editor’s Note: The following is a guest blog for SavetheInternet.com by Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.):

On Wednesday in the Senate Commerce Committee I warned that those of us who believe in net neutrality will block legislation that doesn’t get the job done.

It looks like that’s the fight we’re going to have.

The Commerce Committee voted on net neutrality and it failed on an 11-11 tie. This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer.

It will not stand.

I voted against this lousy bill for two reasons: because net neutrality and internet build-out are crucial to building a more modern and fair Information Society, and both were pushed aside by the Republicans.

Everyone says they don’t want the new world we’re living in to be marked by the digital divide — the term is so clichéd it’s turned to mush — but yesterday was a test of who is willing to ask corporate America to do anything to fix it, and the Commerce Committee failed miserably. Why are United States Senators afraid to say that companies should be expected to foster growth by building out their broadband networks to increase access?

Free and open access to the internet is something all Americans should enjoy, regardless of what financial means they’re born into or where they live. It is profoundly disappointing that the Senate is going let a handful of companies hold internet access hostage by legalizing the cherry-picking of cable service providers and new entrants. That is a dynamic that would leave some communities with inferior service, higher cable rates, and even the loss of service. Not to mention inadequate internet service — in the age of the information.

This bill was passed in committee over our objections. Now we need to fight to either fix it or kill it in the full Senate. Senator Wyden has already drawn a line in the sand — putting a “hold” on the bill, which prevents it from going forward for now. But there will be a day of reckoning on this legislation soon, make no mistake about it, and we need you to get engaged — pressure your Senators, follow the issue, demand net neutrality and build-out.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has placed a “hold” on major telecommunications legislation recently approved by the Senate Commerce Committee until clear language is included in the legislation that prevents discrimination in Internet access.

Immediately following the Commerce Committee’s vote against a Net Neutrality amendment, Senator Wyden marched onto the floor of the Senate to demand that the legislation include stronger safeguards against phone and cable company discrimination.

“The major telecommunications legislation reported today by the Senate Commerce Committee is badly flawed,” Wyden told the Senate, according to the transcript of his speech:

“The bill makes a number of major changes in the country’s telecommunications law but there is one provision that is nothing more than a license to discriminate. Without a clear policy preserving the neutrality of the Internet and without tough sanctions against those who would discriminate, the Internet will be forever changed for the worse.”

A hold signals his intent to filibuster until certain issues in the Stevens’ bill are cleared up. According to the Senate’s official site, a hold is:

“An informal practice by which a Senator informs his or her floor leader that he or she does not wish a particular bill or other measure to reach the floor for consideration. The Majority Leader need not follow the Senator’s wishes, but is on notice that the opposing Senator may filibuster any motion to proceed to consider the measure.”

Senator Stevens said that he lacks the 60 votes necessary to break a filibuster. If at least 41 Senators stand strong behind Net Neutrality, then Wyden’s hold could keep the Telecom bill from the floor.

The legislation that passed through committee today has toothless provisions on net neutrality, and instead opens the way for companies like AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth to charge consumers and small businesses new and discriminatory fees on top of those they already charge for Internet access.

“The Internet has thrived precisely because it is neutral,” Wyden said. “It has thrived because consumers, and not some giant cable or phone company, get to choose what they want to see and how quickly they get to see it. I am not going to allow a bill to go forward that is going to end surfing the web free of discrimination.”

Watch the video of Wyden’s speech at the Agonist. The full text of Wyden’s statement is available online at Salem-News.com

The Senate Commerce Committee fell a single vote short of passing an amendment to safeguard the free and open Internet as momentum builds toward a full Senate vote on Net Neutrality.

Offered by Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), the amendment to Senator Stevens’ telecommunications bill (S. 2686) would have ensured meaningful protection for Net Neutrality, preventing big phone and cable companies from turning the Internet into their private tollway.

The amendment failed by a tie vote of 11-11. All ten Democratic committee members voted in favor with Senator Snowe. The eleven remaining Republican members voted against the amendment.

Follows are statements by SavetheInternet.com member organizations:

Ben Scott, Policy Director, Free Press:

“The tie vote in the Commerce Committee shows the gathering momentum for Network Neutrality across political lines. In the past several weeks, this fundamental principle has moved from obscurity to the center stage in the debate over our nation’s telecommunications policy. The issue of Net Neutrality will continue to gain speed as the full Senate takes up a bill that will determine the fate of Internet freedom.

“The voices of millions of average citizens are just starting to break through the misinformation and lies being peddled by the big phone and cable companies who want to erect tollbooths on the Internet. Across the country, people are catching on to these companies’ plans, and they won’t forget which leaders stood up for the public interest.

“We applaud the bipartisan leadership of Senators Snowe and Dorgan on this crucial issue, and thank all of the senators who will carry on the fight for a free and open Internet as this legislation moves forward.”

Jeannine Kenney, Senior Policy Analyst, Consumers Union:

“The network neutrality nondiscrimination principle, which protects competition, maximizes consumer choice, and guarantees fair market practices, is one step closer to being abandoned with the Senate Commerce Committee’s vote. This endangers the most important engine for economic growth and democratic communication in modern society. Nondiscrimination made possible the grand successes of the Internet. Its removal can take them away.

“The biggest winners today are big money and special interest industry groups — and no one else. But this fight is far from over. The public can win back Internet freedom by ringing up their Senators and telling them that consumers need more broadband choices than monopoly cable and phone providers that discriminate.”

Mark Cooper, Director of Consumer Research, Consumer Federation of America:

“The Committee today handed telephone and cable companies a license to be the gatekeepers for consumers’ access to their online services and information providers.

“Unless the rest of the Senate stands up for the public interest, consumers can kiss goodbye the wide array of low-cost, competitive choices and stunning innovation that the Internet has brought them. It is consumers, and not the bells and cable giants, who get to choose who wins and loses in the online marketplace.”

[UPDATE, 3:15pm EST . . . They are discussing amendment now . . . Vote imminent . . . stay tuned . . .]

The Senate Commerce Committee “mark-up” on Senator Stevens’ massive Telecommunications Act has dragged through Tuesday without discussion of the Snowe-Dorgan Net Neutrality amendment. A vote on this is now likely to occur late Wednesday afternoon.

This vote is critical. If your senator sits on the committee, he/she needs to hear from you today. Ask him/her to vote in committee to support the Snowe-Dorgan Net Neutrality amendment to the larger Telecom Act (S. 2686). The amendment would reinstate protections for network neutrality and ensure that all content, applications and services are treated equally, prohibiting broadband network operators from blocking, degrading, or prioritizing service on their networks.

Here are the members of the committee who have not taken a strong position in favor of Internet freedom and for the Snowe-Dorgan Amendment. Call them now:

Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)
Phone: 202-224-3004

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
Phone: 202 -224-2235

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)
Phone: 202-224-2353

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.)
Phone: 202-224-5274

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)
Phone: 202 224 3224

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.)
Phone: 202 224-4623

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.)
Phone: 202-224-6253

Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.)
Phone: 202-224-2644

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.)
Phone: 202-224-6551

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.)
Phone: 202-224-6244

Sen. John E. Sununu (R-N.H.)
Phone: 202-224-2841

Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.)
Phone: 202-224-3753

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.)
Phone: 202 224-6121

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas)
Phone: 202-224-5922

Sen. George Allen (R-Va.)
Phone: 202-224-4024

Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)
Phone: 202-224-6472

Your phone calls actually make a difference. Please call now and urge your senators to support the bipartisan Snowe-Dorgan Internet Freedom amendment in the Commerce Committee. The free and open Internet as we know it is on the line.

Make the call and report back via the comment thread below.

Thanks to all who have created and submitted videos on behalf of SavetheInternet.com. Here are two that came over the transom on Friday. The first comes from SpeakEasy Productions via SavetheInternet partners MediaChannel. Check it out:

The second is a product of Amanda Congdon and her crew at RocketBoom. Amanda takes her Volvo for a spin to illustrate the threat posed by big firms that try to squash the little guy to “buy popularity” and monopolize access. Check it out:

A third was created by STI ally and inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In it he challenges the U.S. Congress to act according to America’s fundamental values of freedom of speech and freedom of connection, instead of caving to “the misguided short-term interested of large corporations.”

“I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space,” Sir Tim states. “I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.”  Watch the Video:

Sir Tim Berners Lee “Protect Net Neutrality”

The success of these videos (several were in YouTube’s “Top Ten” with more than 200,000 downloads) is a testament to the free and open Internet, where the best ideas rise as a result of Net user choice and not by special selection of AT&T, Verizon and Bell South. Our friends at the telco front group “Hands off the Internet” have tried to buy that sort of popularity, with little success.

Watch these and other SavetheInternet videos and send us your own.

For AT&T and Verizon to be screaming for the protection of the free market against Net Neutrality is “sheer hypocrisy,” writes Internet guru Cory Doctorow. “They themselves are creatures of government regulation, basing their business on government-granted extraordinary privileges.”

In a commentary in InformationWeek today, Doctorow skillfully dismisses the telco argument about getting properly paid for the bandwidth that others use.

“This argument is rubbish,” he writes. “Internet companies already are paying for bandwidth from their providers, often the same companies that want to charge them yet again under their new proposals.”

Companies like AT&T and Verizon claim that this sort of “triple dipping” – charging consumers once and content providers twice – is necessary for them to provide the high speed services that Americans demand. In order to do this, they seek to become gatekeepers to content – charging an extra layer of fees for access to the fast lane.

Doctorow’s article strips the Net Neutrality debate down to its core. It’s all about stopping the phone companies “from committing ‘neutricide’ –destruction of the neutrality of the Internet,” he writes.

“It’s a dumb idea to put the plumbers who laid a pipe in charge of who gets to use it. It’s a way to ensure that incumbents with the deepest pockets will always be able to deliver a better service to the public, simply by degrading the quality of everyone else’s offerings. If you want to ensure that no one ever gets to creatively destroy an industry the way that Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo, and others have done, just make paying rent to a phone company a prerequisite for doing business.

“Practically everyone agrees on this. Only the carriers oppose it, and their opposition is so lame it’d be funny if it wasn’t so scary. The core argument from the carriers is that Google and other Internet companies get a ‘free ride’ on their pipes. AT&T and others take the position that if you look up a search result or stream a video from Google using your DSL connection, Google profits, but the carriers don’t get a share of the proceeds.

“That’s wrong.”

Doctorow calls for meaningful regulation that would protect Net Neutrality while stopping the phone companies’ plan for a tiered Internet. But he states that the devil is in the details. Any regulation should protect consumers, foster more competition and ensure that new entrants and ideas aren’t blocked from the Internet’s marketplace of ideas.

Stevens’ Senate bill — as it is currently written – won’t get us there. And it’s stunningly disingenuous for Telco executives and their front groups to paint this vehicle as de-regulation that helps the consumer. Doctrow writes:

“There are few industries that owe their existence to regulation as much as the carriers. These companies are gigantic corporate welfare bums, having received the invaluable boon of a set of rights-of-way leading into every basement in America. Phone companies have a legal right to force you to provide access to your home for their pipes. Try calculating what it would cost to get into every U.S. home without a regulator clearing your path, and you quickly realize that the carriers should be the last people complaining about the distorting effect of regulation on their business.

“The Bells and cable companies owe their existence to governmental largesse, and, while they’re profit-making private firms, they are, in effect, quasigovernmental organizations. A Bell that wants to get rid of regulation is about as practical as a cotton-candy cone that wants to get rid of sugar. Bells are nothing but a thin veneer of arrogance wrapped around a regulatory monopoly.”

Two of the Internet’s top business innovators made a case for Net Neutrality today in an op-ed written for the San Jose Mercury News:

“Reinstating the Internet’s core principle of net neutrality won’t stand in the way of innovation,” write John Doerr and Reed Hastings. “Indeed, net neutrality has, until recently, been the very foundation of Internet innovation.”

Top venture capitalist Doerr joined NetFlix co-founder Hastings to call on Congress to prevent the nation’s largest phone and cable companies from gutting Net Neutrality and squashing the innovation that has made the Internet an economic force.

Phone companies have stated their intention to give favored nation status to their own or allied businesses’ Web sites, thereby slowing or, even, blocking access to rival search engines, music dowload sites, social networking communities, online phone services, or other applications. Net Neutrality would prevent this discrimination. The most profitable online business ideas would rise as a result of user preference, and not by special selection of the companies that control the pipes.

Doer and Hastings write:

“Because of the unfettered power of phone and cable companies to control consumer access to Internet content, we need tailored safeguards that prevent network operators from discriminating in the delivery or prioritization of content based on source or ownership. We are not proposing a new, heavy-handed set of regulations. Consumers deserve tailored safeguards that prevent network operators from affirmatively blocking, degrading or impairing consumer access to the Internet content, services and applications of their choice or discriminating in the delivery of Internet content.”

Until recently, they write, Net Neutrality has ensured the Internet’s growth into a vibrant and non-discriminatory marketplace:

“Today, we take for granted the convenience of the Internet. But we should not overlook that the basic principle of net neutrality has enabled the Internet innovations that produce great benefits for consumers and economic prosperity for our nation.”

Hastings reports that it’s because of Net Neutrality that his Netflix grew from a small online business into one today that serves 5 million subscribers.

Doerr and Hastings argue that other business innovations are now under threat by moves by the likes of AT&T and Verizon that would stifle the openness that has been a hallmark of the Internet:

“Cable and phone companies are currently working on Capitol Hill to protect their ability to discriminate in the delivery or prioritization of Internet content based on its source or ownership. The giant cable and phone companies don’t want Congress to limit their power to discriminate against Web sites. They want to be able to pick and choose the Internet content that travels via high-speed broadband.”

This discrimination defies the Internet’s stunning evolution toward an end-to-end system, where control resides not with middlemen but with those of us who go online.

Under this revolutionary system, rewards go to the businesses that enhance our choices — not those that restrict them.

Moreover, when choice is left with end users, the best businesses rise to the top as the result of a true and virtual free market. When monopoly ISPs discriminate, new economic ideas aren’t given a chance to compete against the status quo. Innovation is snubbed out. Economic growth slows to a halt.

Read the op-ed.

Charles Cooper, the executive editor at CNet, wrote an article today about the way telcos spin and deceive lawmakers into voting against the best interests of their constituents.

“Since the completion of last year’s telecommunications mega-mergers, small and medium-size businesses have been getting hosed–with Uncle Sam playing the role of complicit bystander,” he writes.

Cooper is referring to the SBC-AT&T and Verizon-MCI mergers announced in 2005. Telco lobbyists spun these mergers as pro-consumer and pro-business developments. Prices will plummet they crowed.

But since the late fall, prices for local private lines have done the opposite — increasing for both consumers and businesses. “Maybe I missed the fine print on the press releases but how do they square price increases with the public interest?” Cooper asks.

Today, these newly re-assembled telco giants are spending tens of millions of dollars to spin lawmakers with the same arguments against Net Neutrality. But decision makers in Washington might want to check voters’ pocketbooks before rubber stamping legislation to gut Net Neutrality.

Cooper cites research by Simon Wilkie, which found that as long as AT&T and MCI remained independent, “competition naturally curbed the Bell companies’ ability to ram through price hikes.” Once they merged and that competition disappeared, presto-change-o! Higher prices.

In the Net Neutrality debate, telcos seek to leverage their monopoly control of DSL and FTTH broadband markets to erect new tollbooths on the exits and on-ramps of the information Superhighway.

They say this control will be good for consumers and businesses. But what other options do we have?

Many of the Web innovators and start-ups — that historically have have been the engines for new ideas and economic growth online — won’t be able to pay the toll for access to AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth’s gated lanes. And customers will be subject to limited Web choices and higher prices from monopoly ISPs that pick and choose content.

If a frustrated user decides to take her business to a more open ISP, she will face few to no choices in the market. (Remember, that more than 95% of the broadband market is controlled by major phone and cable providers. And they call this “Net Competition”).

The telcos — with the aide of their sundry Astroturf front groups — argue that they need to charge companies an extra level of fees so that consumers don’t have to pay higher prices. They need this extra money to fund the build out of networks to needy Americans.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently called this idea “ridiculous.” “They’re already making lots of money off consumers connected to the Internet,” he said. “They just figure they can make more money charging the big content providers for the best service.”

The monopolists at telco headquarters are now declaring poverty. (Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T have a cumulative market cap of more than $250 billion; their gross annual profits exceed $85 billion).

The truth is that they will build out their high-speed networks whether there are Network Neutrality rules or not.

The cable companies have largely built out their networks already. And it’s more cost efficient for telephone companies to upgrade their copper wires to compete with cable.

The only reason that they are claiming a need to get rid of Net Neutrality is because they see an opportunity to extract monopoly rents from new sources. They want to pass a law that awards them with gatekeeper control of Internet content — locking in a new stream of revenue and wider profit margins at the expense of everyone but themselves.

But they won’t tell Washington that.

Back at CNet, Cooper goes one further to illustrate how these powerful corporations operate behind the scenes in Washington to get anything they want. His conclusion: “ …the public’s interest would be better served if we all paid greater attention. The problem is that we usually find out something’s amiss after it’s too late.”

It’s not too late to stop the legislative juggernaut against Net Neutrality. Take action to stop the telcos today.

Critics of Net Neutrality measures in Congress have claimed there are no historical examples of abuse by ISPs and therefore government should not interfere. However, Jason Miller of WebProNews writes about an example of abuse coming out of Canada that shows how the words of intent coming from the men who run phone and cable companies have not been considered as evidence of what will happen here in the U.S.

The Net Neutrality opponents have “downplayed arguments in favor of Net Neutrality as ‘a problem in search of a solution,’ ‘rhetorical excesses,’ or ‘cock-and-bull’ stories,” Miller writes. He points to an instance where Canada’s Shaw Communications is charging customers a fee for “Quality of Service Enhancement” that will allow them to run Vonage’s phone service instead of their own:

“…It is a perfect example of where the consumer is forced to pay a third time for the service they want (expect that as the norm without legislative protections) and a large company bullies a smaller company infringing on its turf, staunch supporters of a perverted idea of a free market will again discount it only because it happened in Canada and not the U.S.

“But mostly it is important to remember who benefits most on either side of the issue. Over a million petitioners have pleaded with Congress to preserve the open nature of the Internet, but Congress seems more inclined to listen to a handful of corporations who stand to reap billions of dollars against the interests and desires of their customers - a customer base that will have few choices in the end.”

Companies like AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth have publicly committed to Net Neutrality principles stating that it “makes no sense” to degrade or block Internet services. The free market would not allow it; we would lose customers, they claim, conveniently ignoring the fact that most U.S. broadband customers have nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile they’re spending millions lobbying Congress against any meaningful legislation to protect Net Neutrality. AT&T and Bell South, even, “have expressed their intent to follow Shaw’s example and extend those types of tolls to other Internet services,” writes Miller.

The telcos talk out of both sides of their mouths — claiming that they have no intention to block or degrade customer access to sites while also talking about charging content providers in a way that would allow them to do just that.

Meanwhile, our elected representatives are being snowed over by a telco media and lobbying blitz that has convinced many to vote against the best interests of their constituents — and to hand over control of the Internet to companies that plan to undermine its very freedoms.

Amazon.com’s Paul Misener handily defeated Mike McCurry — co-Chair of the telecom front group “Hands off the Internet” — in a debate over Net Neutrality at George Washington University on Friday.

Watch the segment in question, posted at PoliticsTV. The video shows a slow-motion implosion of the telco argument against Net Neutrality. In the “Question and Answer” section, Misener points out that large bandwidth users such as Amazon already pay for their use of bandwidth.

But it is not content companies’ use of the pipes, but user choice that’s really at stake.

“It’s not true that Internet content companies don’t pay for access to the Internet.” Misener says. “We pay handsomely for access to the Internet Amazon pays millions of dollars a year to connect to the internet… There are a lot of ways that companies at the edge providing content are already paying the network operators.”

McCurry asks: “Paul, isn’t that exactly the kind of tiered pricing that everyone who proposes net neutrality rails against?”

“No” replies Misener:

“Tiered pricing for access is something we support. Amazon pays a lot more than ‘Joe’s-Internet-retail.com’ simply because we use more capacity… That makes perfect sense to us. You pay for that capacity. But the important component here is that once the consumer has paid for his or her capacity at their home they ought to be able to use that capacity however they want. There’s a fundamental misconception here that somehow delivery of video over the Internet is just like it is over cable TV, over satellite, over broadcast or, frankly, like delivery of content through newspapers or magazines. Those models have always been about ‘push.’ Somebody decides — who either owns the pipe or owns the newspaper — what content goes in their and pushes it out to consumers and they can choose to read it or not.”

Leaving Internet choice in the hands of users – and not handing it over to the middlemen at AT&T, Verizon and Comcast — is precisely what we’re fighting for at SavetheInternet.com.

Misener:

“That’s not the way the Internet works. The Internet does not have all this content in there unless the user asks for it. When you hit return on your browzer it actually sends out a ‘get command’ to the server; it’s a very illustrative name for a command in computer code. It actually says ‘get’– that means now send me the file. That file never gets into the pipes owned by the network operators that Mike represents unless their customer who’s paid for that access asks for it. So we’re not clogging their pipes at all. We’re only providing the content that we hope our joint customers want to see.”

This important point gets to the core of what McCurry’s bosses at AT&T and BellSouth want to do. They want to fundamentally reverse the Internet’s user-powered “pull” model — that is, the model where all choice and intelligence resides with the end-users — and turn it into a “push,” where these same network companies make decisions about what content users get to see based on which companies pay the corporate gatekeepers.

Misener continues:

“When we get to the point of discrimination, there’s also this misnomer when we talk about things like wanting to prioritize videos so things don’t get clogged… We don’t want that either. We don’t think that that’s wrong for the network operators to be able to prioritize certain types of content. So if they want to prioritize telemedicine over data files that makes perfect sense. Let them do it. We’re not opposed to that. The [Net Neutrality] rules that we propose would not do that. Our concern is discriminating among the source or ownership of that content. So if the network operators are put in a position of favoring the Mayo Clinic over Johns Hopkins, that’s a problem. That’s the discrimination. That’s when the network operators become the HMO.”

This is the sort of discrimination that the phone companies want to put in place. For proof of that go no further than a Washington Post story from last December when William L. Smith, chief technology officer for BellSouth Corp., “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.”

This discrimination would turn the Internet on it’s head, ceding control to large corporations that seek to impose an old media model (top down) in place of the bottom-up Internet that has become a force for innovation, economic growth and democratic participation today.

In response to Misener, McCurry could do little better than sputter that Net Neutrality would allow sexual deviants to prey on teenagers at MySpace. Witness this age-old debating tactic. It’s become common to political discourse of late: when backed into a corner, sow fear and obfuscate. (Listen to McCurry’s reply at 5:35 of the “Question and Answer” segment and judge for yourself).

Here’s McCurry again:

“On our side of the debate we often say that you cannot point to an instance of true discrimination or a real problem that exists — this solution in search of a problem argument. You are kind of hypothetically raising what you think the structure of the problem might look like down the road. Because we certainly are not there yet. I think there is one instance, in which I think the Commission then did get in and address it and it was resolved. But beyond that, can you think of any other instance where anticipating a problem like this you then went in to try to develop and define a regulatory structure that might prevent the problem. Is that a good way to approach policy making?”

Misener:

“I would share a lot of that concern. My free-market Republican predilections would be to be concerned if this were new, and if rules didn’t already apply… These are temporary conditions applied to AT&T and Verizon.”

These temporary merger conditions expire soon Misener adds:

“So the fact that they haven’t done it yet is because it has been illegal. So they keep saying, ‘can you see a problem. There’s not a problem.’

It’s been illegal. It’s been illegal and it still is illegal for AT&T and Verizon… Monopolists will always seek the profit maximizing point. So if they’re looking for that profit maximizing point they will do what they can to get to that point. What we’re suggesting that they have fully announced their intentions to do this. These are not some rogues. These are the CEOs of companies saying that they plan to engage in this sort of discrimination. I’m not saying that it’s the best business plan but they have announced that they want to do it.”

To which McCurry replies:

“Well, this is a question of definition: One person’s tiered pricing, building a faster lane is another person’s definition of discrimination. [The ISPs] have said and pledged that they can’t degrade services that they provide currently… That is stipulated to by everybody and agreed, if you don’t trust the phone companies for whatever reason keep the Commission there wary and watchful to make sure that they do that. But again you’re not giving me a good sense that there’s a definition of the problem that you can use.”

Misener breaks through this static:

“Sure there is. Discrimination based on the source or ownership of the content. That’s real easy. If you want to discriminate and favor telemedicine offer data files, that’s fine. But don’t pick the Mayo Clinic over Johns Hopkins. That’s pretty easy. And a complaint system where Johns Hopkins can go to the Commission and say Mayo Clinic was given a better deal than we. That makes perfect sense.”

Indeed. Again, watch it and judge for yourself: http://www.politicstv.com/blog/?p=261