Congress has big plans for technology reform in 2006

12/27/2005 7:04:51 PM, by Ryan Paul

Congress plans to cover some important tech issues in 2006, and there are a few pieces of interesting legislation on the table. I often wonder what our elected officials do when they aren't wasting our money, diminishing our freedom, or bickering with each other like ill-mannered children. Although the situation in Iraq is sure to monopolize a big chunk of their time, they also want to spend time on issues like digital communication, intellectual property law, and computer security.

Communications reform is an important issue this year, and any of several proposed reforms could be used to mitigate some of the problems that currently afflict companies and consumers. Existing telecom laws are woefully out of date, and some fresh ideas will definitely shore up the cracks. House Energy and Commerce Committe Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) wants a network neutrality law to prevent broadband providers from limiting consumer choices. In October, SBC (now AT&T) publicly stated that they did not want consumers to be able to use competing VoIP services over SBC broadband. The network neutrality provisions would effectively prevent anticompetitive ISPs from artificially impeding third-party network services desired by consumers.

more...

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051227-5854.html

Big ISPs, and search engines are the biggest free speech threats we have right now. Its good to hear a republican is doing something sane for once.

Ya know, that's ironic, because Comcast was a proponent of the concept furthered by BellSouth to base QoS on the domain, which I did then and do now find deplorable.