In February I followed the first presentations in the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation on the topic of net neutrality. The issues, also demonstrated in these videos (I/II/III), were presented by Google's Vint Cerf and a few Telecommunication sharks as well as (in a different session): the academic community with the likes of Lawrence Lessig (click for his testimony, pdf) and Gregory Sidak. I followed this for many hours. It escapes me, how one cannot understand the case for net neutrality, against a tiered Internet. You don't have to be a lefty or a tech buff to support net neutrality. The inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners Lee spoke out against a multi-tiered Internet. Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney wrote a piece for the Washington Post on June 8 to make the case once more before Congress decides on it. They phrased the issue succinctly:

"Net neutrality means simply that all like Internet content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the network. The owners of the Internet's wires cannot discriminate. This is the simple but brilliant "end-to-end" design of the Internet that has made it such a powerful force for economic and social good: All of the intelligence and control is held by producers and users, not the networks that connect them."

I blogged before about initiatives like savetheinternet.com where real grass-roots coalition of more than 700 groups, 5,000 bloggers and 750,000 individual Americans who have rallied in support of net neutrality. It was also on June 8 that the U.S. House of Representatives rejected the concept of Net neutrality. The vote was divided along party lines with Democrats supporting net neutrality.

ZDNet: "Its Republican backers, along with broadband providers such as Verizon and AT&T, say it has sufficient Net neutrality protections for consumers, and more extensive rules would discourage investment in wiring American homes with higher-speed connections."

Cybertelecom.org offers a very partial list of supporters and opponents:

I am shocked about this decision against net neutrality that by anyone's standards blocks innovation simply in favor of profit for the big telecommunication firms. This issue seems to sell itself to the rest of the world but not so to the Republican wing of the US Congress.

BBC: "Why the net should stay neutral," and SLATE.com "Why we should care about net neutrality."

This decision by Congress does not mean that the Verizon's and AT&T's of this world will suddenly introduce an Internet structure that sells higher bandwidth to those who can afford it, thus killing off startups who could not afford such privileged treatment. But it does leave the Internet vulnerable to such development, which puts at risk everything we love about the Internet as we know it.