Update: The House voted, and Net Neutrality lost. I’ll update with a list of which congresspeople (mostly Republicans) are apparently in bed with big Telecom. Whatever the telcos paid to lobby Congress, it was money well spent. Meanwhile, expect your prices for hosting and internet access to go up and your freedom of choice to go down.

Update2: Here are the Reps who voted Yea or Nea on the Markey Amendment (Net Neutrality). I’m pleased to say that Mr. Rangel (my local Congressman) voted YEA. Thank you for at least trying to do the right thing. It looks like it’s mainly the GOP that voted this down. Big surprise.

Dear Congressman,

From a quick search, it looks like you are not supporting "Net Neutrality" going into law. And as a New Yorker in your voting district, I’m writing to try to convince you otherwise. I can’t think of any good reason not to support Net Neutrality, unless one wants special perks for big telecom.

The fact is that the network carriers do get paid for their services, and quite well. We pay ISPs to host our websites and give us access. And they in turn pay the networks to connect everyone together. Telecoms currently provide the maximum bandwidth they have at the market price, and that price ignores content and origin.

Should networks be able to extort additional money from internet companies and end-users by threatening to lower transmission quality for people and companies who don’t pay extra? That’s what they want. And it’s a protection racket, pure and simple. It has no place in our economy or our law.

The fact of the matter is that if telecoms can decide, on a case by case basis, whose quality to degrade, they can not only extort money, they can discriminate against political views they don’t like, perhaps yours or mine. And they can effectively shut down competing services before they grow. It’s anti-democratic, and anti-free market. How can one possibly not support a level, democratic playing field? It’s what makes the internet work.

For a current example of what’s to come, Craigslist, the popular grass-roots classifieds site is reportedly being blocked by Comcast right now, ostensibly due to some filtering issue that should have been fixed months ago. It turns out that Comcast has its own classifieds service, which is losing out to free Craigslist. Should we legalize presumably anti-competitive behavior like this?

So I’m writing to say that I’m watching your vote on this one, and I want you to do the right thing. I know you will.

Sincerely,

Avi Bar-Ze’ev