Bloggers Unite and Take Fight to the Hill

April 28th, 2006 by tkarr

As of this morning, more than 1,500 blogs have taken up the cause, posting links to SavetheInternet.com or urging their readers to take action by calling on members of Congress to stand firm in defense of Internet freedom. And the Hill is hearing it.

“We would not have turned the corner in this fight without your blogs, your voices,” Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass) said yesterday during a teleconference with a handful of bloggers. “We need to put every members of Congress on record on where they stand on the future of the Internet,” Markey said. That momentum has shifted in Congress, “is a reflection of the rumbling in cyberspace about what’s going on with this bill.”

Markey is now rallying colleagues on the left and the right to support the introduction of his Network Neutrality Amendment onto the full floor next week. But it’s an uphill battle. In order for the amendment to be voted upon by all members, it has to first get approval from the House’s own gatekeepers within the Rules Committee — which Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi calls “the free world’s outstanding bureaucratic abomination — a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.”

This 13 member committee (9-Reps; 4-Dems) holds the congressional agenda in its grip. If Rules votes down your amendment, your amendment is DOA. Bloggers are banding together to ensure that no Member of Congress gets off the hook this easily.

“There’s a white hot firestorm on the issue on Capitol Hill,” Matt Stoller said in a post at MYDD. “No one wants to see the telcos make a radical change to the Internet and screw this medium up, except, well, the telcos.”

Politicians get scared when they realize the public is paying attention. As the blogosphere catches fire, momentum is shifting for our cause. Whereas before, the big telephone companies and their well greased lobbyists were confident that Congress would simply roll over and do their bidding, today, no member of Congress can in good conscience vote with the telecom cartel.

The public is now watching and we will not stand for any law that threatens Internet freedom.

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