From Privacy Digest:

A Republican-controlled House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday defeated a proposal that would have levied extensive regulations on broadband providers and forcibly prevented them from offering higher-speed video services to partners or affiliates.

By an 8-to-23 margin, the committee members rejected a Democratic-backed “Net neutrality” amendment to a current piece of telecommunications legislation.

This bill stems from complaints by providers like Verizon that websites are getting a “free ride” as far as bandwidth is concerned, an argument that even to the passing eye is patently ridiculous. Their argument boils down to, “We’re providing bandwidth, they’re providing content without having to provide the bandwidth for it.”

It’s utterly and unbelievably stupid.

First of all, Verizon has one major advantage over most content providers on the internet. Subscription fees. For the most part, content on the internet, or at least a majority of it, is still free and supported by ads.

Secondly, Verizon is a bandwidth / service provider, despite the content provider they want to be. They already charge users for the privilege of using their network, but now that they’ve decided it’s more lucrative to be in the content market, they want to double dip and charge anyone but them (or their “approved content partners”) for the privilege of being presented at the same speed as their own content.

The implications for the net are disastrous, and the response from one of the geniuses who voted against it is blissfully ignorant:

“This is not Chicken Little, the sky is not falling, we’re not going to change the direction of the axis of the earth on this vote,” said Rep. John Shimkus, an Illinois Republican. He said overregulatory Net neutrality provisions would amount to picking winners and losers in the marketplace and discourage investment in faster connections that will benefit consumers.

Last week, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton said: “Before we get too far down the road, I want to let the market kind of sort itself out, and I’m not convinced that we really have a problem with Net neutrality.”

In other words, once it becomes a problem, we’ll try to roll it back and at that point, at which point Verizon can say, “We’ve already done this,” and the government can go, “You’re right… We can’t change history…”

Yadda yadda. As opposed to the law that forced carriers to maintain neutrality, Republicans lobbed a softball pitch.

Barton and other Republican leaders of the House panel did, however, offer some modest changes to a telecommunications bill in response to concerns from Internet and software companies.

Their replacement bill would require the Federal Communications Commission to vet all complaints of violations of Net neutrality principles within 90 days. It gave the FCC the power to levy fines of up to $500,000 per violation.

It also contained explicit language denying the FCC the authority to make new rules on Net neutrality. Democrats charged that lack of enforcement power would mean the FCC would be unable to deal with the topic flexibly.

Rep. Charles Pickering, a Mississippi Republican, backed that less-regulatory approach, saying that a “case-by-case adjudicatory process” is the best way to address Net neutrality concerns while ensuring competition in the marketplace.

Competition in the marketplace.

Yawn…

It seems as if Pickering, Shimkus, and others want this to happen first then deal with it later. I would love to know how this helps competing content providers, of which most internet service providers are now trying to become to increase revenue. Nice to see our government is all about fostering a competitive marketplace. I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort as you’re forced to use Verizon’s crap web portal to search because Google loads slowly on Verizon’s network.

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