An amendment by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to a communications bill that would guarantee the common carrier status of the Internet was defeated today in the House Commerce Committee by a vote of 22-34.

Our own representative, Chip Pickering, is vice-chairman of the committee, and there's little question of how he voted. Look at where his campaign money comes from.

There is nothing to be gained by allowing the major broadband providers to sell better service to firms that pay them more and to degrade everyone else's service, except more profits for the providers. Such an arrangement will put startups at a terrific disadvantage because the giants will have the money to purchase special treatment for their IP packets.

This is a land grab in cyberspace and if it succeeds we will all be the poorer for it. Call your representative and let him or her know that you expect the Internet to remain neutral, like a common carrier.

Below are some related articles. The Lessig article is particularly good:

[W]hen the Internet first reached beyond research facilities to the masses, it did so on regulated lines — telephone lines. Had the telephone companies been free of the “heavy hand” of government regulation, it’s quite clear what they would have done — they would have killed it, just as they did when Paul Baran first proposed the idea in 1964. It was precisely because they were not free to kill it, because the “heavy hand[ed]” regulation required them to act neutrally, that the Internet was able to happen, and then flourish.

So Waltzman’s [house majority telecommunications counsel] wrong about the Internet’s past. But he’s certainly right about what a mandated net neutrality requirement would be. It would certainly be a “complete step backward for the Internet” — back to the time when we were world leaders in Internet penetration, and competition kept prices low and services high. Today, in the world where the duopoly increasingly talks about returning us to the world where innovation is as the network owners says, broadband in the US sucks. We are somewhere between 12th and 19th in the world, depending upon whose scale you use. As the Wall Street Journal reported two months ago, broadband in the US is “slow and expensive.” Verizon’s entry-level broadband is $14.95 for 786 kbs. That about $20 per megabit. In FRANCE, for $36/m, you get 20 megabits/s — or about $1.80 per megabit.

Save the Internet

TPM Cafe: Net Neutrality Defeated -- Telcos and Cable Win

Daily Kos: Net Neutrality Committee Vote Update

Washington Post: Intel Offers Support for Net Legislation

Lessig: the fiction zone that DC has become