We were packed like sardines in an ornate House hearing room, reduced to sitting on the floor in a room overflowing with telecom lobbyists who avoid waiting in line by paying line-sitting companies upwards of $30 an hour.
But unlike the phone and cable lobbyists, who may have been fresh and smiling walking into the hearing room, those of us who care about freedom on the Internet walked out smiling. Despite an unprecedented industry lobbying campaign that one House aide called the biggest since the energy bill, 20 members of the House Judiciary Committee on May 25 did the right thing. They voted for HR 5417, the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act. The bill was bipartisan from the get-go, having the sponsorship of Committee Chair James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and ranking minority member John Conyers (D-MI). Usually, a committee chair's bill passes.
But there was nothing usual about this bill, which Sensenbrenner and Conyers put together when House leadership denied them any jurisdiction over the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement (COPE) bill, that the House Commerce Committee approved a few weeks ago.
The COPE bill rewrites our telecom law, and is a disaster for anyone who believes in the Internet as our public square, the place where we can blog, exchange views, get information from diverse sources, and engage in our democracy. COPE will permit the big telephone and cable companies to levy fees on content providers and web sites, meaning that our Common Cause web site, or your favorite blog might not be able to pay high fees and be relegated to some back road on the information superhighway, slow to access and hard to find. COPE also will greatly harm innovation because the new Googles and the new eBays and Yahoos won't be able to afford to access a large audience who will appreciate their inventions.
To their credit, Reps. Sensenbrenner, Conyers, and co-sponsors Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Rick Boucher (D-CA), understood what was at stake. Chairman Sensenbrenner argued that COPE's impact on competition meant that the House Judiciary Committee, which regulates anti-competitive practices by businesses, should have a piece of the action on the bill. But the House Rules Committee turned him down. So was born the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act.
The legislation essentially uses anti-trust law to protect all of us from marauding telecom companies, and to ensure net neutrality - our right to access whatever we want on the Internet, and to use any lawful application, without the interference of our Internet Service Provider.
To say that the telecom companies don't like net neutrality is like saying that George Bush had issues with Sadaam Hussein. They loosed hundreds of their lobbyists on Capitol Hill. "Things are going ballistic. It's one of the biggest lobbying frenzies I've seen," confided one weary Hill staffer the night before the vote.
Staffers were inundated by Hill briefings. They were buried in paper. And you could have plastered the walls of the Capitol with all the full page, and misleading ads, that so-called "grassroots" coalitions placed in The Washington Post, Roll Call and The Hill.
The other side indulged in "truthiness" as Stephen Colbert would say: claiming that "regulating" the Internet would harm it when in truth it has been sensible regulation that has preserved it for all the years it has been in existence.
They claimed that without being able to charge fees to content providers, that they would lack the money to invest in Internet "pipes", ignoring the fact that they already are receiving billions of dollars each year from folks buying access to those pipes, enough to finance an expansion.
They argued that protecting freedom of access on the Internet would kill innovation, as if any good new ideas ever came out of a Bell or cable company, where the business model is all about using monopoly power to control prices.
And they told us to trust them. Just like they told us in 1996, when Congress gave the phone and cable companies what they wanted. The cable companies hiked prices, and the phone companies went to court to negate all the promises about letting in competition that they had made. As Chairman Sensenbrenner said at the hearing, "Trust but verify," is a good way to go.
All week, committee members were on the fence. Nobody knew quite how the vote would go. Thousands of activists from Common Cause called into House offices. Common Cause volunteers in Washington mobilized many many more members in targeted districts.
Common Cause state offices, and members of our National Governing Board, also helped. And we had reinforcements. The SavetheInternet.org Coalition, the Christian Coalition, the National Religious Broadcasters, all realized what was at stake and fought hard.
The pressure was great, but 20 members held their ground, although a number of them did so with equivocating statements, calling the Sensenbrenner-Conyers bill "imperfect" but necessary.
In addition to the bill's sponsors, Members voting Yes were: Bob Goodlatte (R-VA); Daniel Lungren (D-CA); William Jenkins (R-TN); Chris Cannon (R-UT); Bob Inglis (R-SC); Howard Berman (D-CA); Gerry Nadler (D-NY); Bobby Scott (D-VA); Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX); Maxine Waters (D-CA); Robert Wexler (D-FL); Anthony Weiner (D-NY); Adam Schiff (D-CA); Linda Sanchez (D-CA); Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL).
Not voting: Reps. Henry Hyde (R-IL); Jeff Flake (R-AZ); Mike Pence (R-IN); Louie Gohmert (R-TX); Mel Watt (D-NC), and Marty Meehan (D-MA). Rep. William Delahunt (D-MA) voted "present".
No votes were: Howard Coble (R-NC); Lamar Smith (R-TX); Elton Gallegly (R-CA); Steven Chabot (R-IL); Spencer Bachus (R-AL); John Hostettler (R-IN); Mark Green (R-WI); Ric Keller (R-FL); Darrell Issa (R-CA); Randy Forbes (R-VA); Steve King (R-IA); Tom Feeney (R-FL), and Trent Franks (R-AZ).
This is just one battle won in a long struggle ahead. But it's good to savor one victory, and hope that it is the path to many more.
