The Energy and Commerce Committee has had its vote on Congressman Markey's amendment to save the Internet, and we lost, 22-34. But it's not a total loss. The four Representatives
targeted in my previous post all flipped, and voted for the Markey amendment. As Matt Stoller
notes, the subcommittee defeated it 23-8, so that we narrowed the margin as much as we did is significant. Here's more from Matt:
There's a white hot firestorm on the issue on Capitol Hill. No one wants to see the telcos make a radical change to the internet and screw this medium up, except, well, the telcos. And now members of Congress are listening to us. The telcos have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years lobbying for their position; we launched four days ago, and have closed a lot of ground. Over the next few months, as the public wakes up, we'll close the rest of it.
I watched the markup and the voting, and there was noticeable defensiveness among Congressmen on the wrong side of this. They are wrong, they know it, and they are ashamed. Now they know people are watching. So we didn't win this vote, but this close margin was nonetheless a smack to the jaw of the insiders, and a clear victory for the people. Now the battle moves out of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and onto more favorable terrain.
As Sean-Paul [agonist.org] said to me over email, "today was a victory as a few key players on the full committee changed their votes. Important action is required heading into the Senate but we have created significant momentum and the telco cartel is very afraid of us now.
This is not how they wanted it to go down. They wanted this amendment to fail quietly, so the Senate would not take it up. We changed the rules today. Great work."
Thanks to all of you who wrote and called your Represenatives. Good job. Now we turn to the Senate, where we're on friendlier ground on this issue.