Net Neutrality

The Senate Commerce Committee approved on Wednesday the telecommunications reform bill with a bi-partisan vote of 15-7.

The bill now named "The Advanced Telecommunications and Opportunity Reform" was initially introduced by Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)
The bill addresses a wide range of communications-related issues, including municipal broadband services, video franchise reform and more.

Several senators, consumer advocate groups, and e-commerce corporations have stated they felt the bill did not address Internet Neutrality effectively.

"Internet Neutrality" has been described as being able to transmit any kind of content is important, to the well being of Internet as a whole and to eLearning in particular.

Jeanine Kenny of the Consumers Union said: "Right now under current law, there's nothing to stop the phone and cable companies from striking a deal to offer high-speed access to a company like Google and refusing to provide any deal at all to a different company like Yahoo. There's not even a rule on the books that would prevent them from blocking Web sites."

Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) proposed an amendment to the bill to "ensure fair treatment of all Internet content." The amendment incorporated the following non-discriminatory principle: "to promote broadband deployment, and presence and promote the open and interconnected nature of the Internet, a broadband service provider shall not discriminate Internet traffic based on source, ownership, or destination of such traffic as part of any publicly available Internet offering."

I recommend read THIS article by Cory Doctorow. Mr. Doctorow does a good job of explaining why we should support Internet Neutrality.
But that just my opinion.