The FCC is considering and will release rules on Tuesday, December 21, about net neutrality, which will protect all Internet users, including those who provide and use Internet radio, from being blocked by Internet service providers, or web radio operators from being charged fees on the recipient's end, they already pay for the bandwidth on the website host end.
But Senator Kay Baily Hutchison (R-Texas), is threatening Internet radio and all other lawful uses by attaching an amendment which would bar the FCC from enforcing Net Neutrality, and that is a serious threat to major Internet radio services such as Pandora, Slacker, Last.fm, mog.com, etc. It could even drive them, and many other major Internet sites such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc., offline or severely reduce their efforts to provide a legally and lawfully protected service.
Net Neutrality would not protect botnets, spammers, terrorists, child pornographers, etc., and that includes any illegal activity, ISPs would be free to block those types of content, but all other commony accessed content and usage of the Internet would be protected.
Go to Senator Hutchison's site, at senate.gov/~hutchison and click on 'Contact Me' on the left, and fill out the email form. 'Texas' will be a default state but you can change that to reflect your actual state of residence. Let her know you strongly disapprove of her attempt to keep the FCC from excercising its constitutional mandate and that any attempt to ban enforcement of Net Neutrality would essentially force the FCC into violating their oaths of office, to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution, as amended by the First Amendment.
In fact, many political sites could be adversely affected, come to think of it.
Without allowing Net Neutrality, we could see a huge loss in jobs, throwing us into a depression, and that could be worse than the already existing recession caused by the housing matter, which by the way started in Las Vegas, and that was never widely reported. The 'dot-com' bubble of 1999-2001 was starting a recession which was exascerbated by the 9/11 attacks, we would have had a recession anyway, but now the high-tech/Internet industry is far larger than then, and many areas with high-tech jobs such as in her own state, near places like Round Rock, could see heavy job losses.
And many small companies may be unable to be online at all, causing huge losses in customers, etc., and they could be brought under not to mention large ones too.
I don't have the bill name or number, but that can be found in the other news reports that are out there, just the mention of her attempt to ban the FCC from enforcing Net Neutrality will help get the message across.
And keep you being able to listen to net radio, and do all the other good things you can do on the net as well. Is that worth preserving? It is.
UPDATE: This was just discovered to be in the Omnibus spending bill that Harry Reid, D-Nevada, the Senate Majority Leader, pulled from consideration by this congress. We still need to write not just our own Senator and House members, because Senator Hutchison or others may try to sneak this in again. It may appear as part of another bill under a new bill number once Congress reconvenes in January. As it was, the Omnibus bill was 2,500 pages long, Republicans were going to ask for a full reading of the bill, which given the size would take the reading clerks more than 48 hours straight to read it all.
And how many people would see the amendment in time toact to scuttle it?
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