COPE ACT VOTE SCHEDULED FOR THIS WEEK

Well, the Internet was safe for a week but it's over now. Congress is back in session.

And the Benton Foundation reports that HR 5252, the infamous "COPE Act", is on this Wednesday's calendar for a vote by the full House of Representatives.

The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, who's pushing a parallel bill (S. 2686), has predicted a vote on his bill in the upper chamber by the end of June.

There are differences between the House and Senate proposals, of course. For one thing, the Senate version neuters the only good thing in the House bill -- the section that protects local communities' right to develop their own public high-speed networks without state interference. But don't sweat the details, because as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, the point of all this is to get something called "national pay-TV franchising" passed by both houses:

The House and Senate are preparing to vote on telecommunications legislation that could affect every American who surfs the Internet, watches cable TV or uses a phone. But consumers shouldn't waste much time watching the floor debates on C-SPAN. The lawmakers admit their goal is not to pass definitive legislation in public in the coming weeks. Instead, they want the House and Senate to pass separate bills, regardless of how different they may be. The final version would be negotiated, largely in private, by about a dozen senators and representatives on a conference committee. The Senate just needs to pass "anything to get us into conference," where the real decisions will be made, House telecommunications subcommittee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) said Tuesday at a telecom forum hosted by National Journal's Technology Daily... While most conference negotiations are closed to public view, lobbyists continue to influence the members and their staffers, sometimes even supplying language that ends up as the law of the land.

That last sentence is what you might call "ironic understatement".

But what about that Sensenbrenner-Conyers "Net Neutrality" bill passed by the House Judiciary Committee on May 25, which makes price or service discrimination by network providers a violation of antitrust law? Won't that save the Internet? Sorry, Henry, but no, it won't. Given that the majority of Republicans (who, um, control the House) on the committee voted against it, Sensenbrenner-Conyers has approximately a hellbound snowball's chance of actually becoming law. But it's a handy campaign prop for Democrats like Sherrod Brown and Ted Strickland, who now have a chance to vote for both the COPE Act and Net Neutrality. Slick, huh?

So, here we go. After all the huffing and puffing and all the learned debate among bloggers, real and astroturfy, the voting's about to start. Your Member of Congress is going to help decide this Wednesday whether the next generation of pay TV and Internet connectivity will be wholly owned (and its content shaped) by a few big telephone and cable corporations. And whether your community will have any control over the way these companies use the public rights of way to deliver their proprietary services. And whether poor city neighborhoods and rural townships will get high-speed services, too. And whether the new system will kick the supports out from under community technology training and access programs. And whether local communities will be free to invest in community-owned networks to serve community needs.

A "Yes" vote on HR 5252 this week will be a vote for duopoly control of next-generation IP services; for the duopolies' right to cherry-pick and redline communities; for stripping local communities of authority over their own public rights of way and their negotiating leverage over cable rates, service issues, public access and community benefits; and against the open Internet. But as far as I know, at this moment not a single Ohio Representative, Democrat or Republican, has made a commitment to vote "No".

If you want to have a say in your Representative's decision, time is running out. You gotta send that email and make that call today. Thursday will be too late.

Dennis Kucinich
Stephanie Tubbs-Jones
Steven LaTourette
Sherrod Brown
Tim Ryan
Ralph Regula

Oh, one more thing: If your Representative or his staffer tells you the COPE Act is going to slash cable TV rates through competition, show him this.