Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Senator Stevens' Bill to Nowhere

Calling all Net Heroes
Stevens' bill is the Senator's wink to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. For the rest of us, it's his bill to nowhere. It needs to be overhauled, or stopped dead in its tracks.

SavetheInternet.com today launched our Senate Map, which tracks where all 100 senators stand on Internet freedom.

The Map is a useful guide to the growing opposition to Senator Ted Stevens' telecommunications bill (S. 2686) -- a sprawling mess of legislation that fails to protect Net Neutrality while handing over control of the Internet to the Senator's allies at AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

You can learn where your senator stands by checking the map and clicking on your state. From there, we encourage you to call your senator and urge him or her to take a public stand for Net Neutrality.

The telcos are continuing to spend like compulsive shoppers -- to buy up airtime for ads, flood Capitol Hill with lobbyists and shills, and plant Op-Eds in local papers across the country.

As the clock ticks down on the 109th Congress they'll be spending millions more to muscle Senator Stevens' 135-page train wreck through the full Senate. But their desperation is beginning to show.

July is a pivotal month. The Senate leadership won’t schedule a vote on Stevens' bad bill unless 60 senators say they will vote for it. Now it's time to call senators and tell them to support Net Neutrality instead -- and to oppose last-ditch industry efforts to push through a bill that Americans are turning against.

The Senate Map makes it ridiculously simple to find out where your senator stands, and to call Congress. As the list of senators who support real Net Neutrality grows, we will record their public commitments via the map.

Stay tuned. With your help, we can match the millions of dollars spent by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth with a million more citizens speaking out on behalf of non-discrimination, interconnection, and the right to innovate online without having to obtain permission from a network operator.

Stevens' bill is the Senator's wink to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. For the rest of us, it's his bill to nowhere. It needs to be overhauled, or stopped dead in its tracks.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link Karr.