Black and Latino Congressmembers Fail To Understand Net Neutrality

Gary Dauphin at huffingtonpost.com is right to call attention to curious votes by members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus on a Democratic amendment to preserve "net neutrality." To wit:

A Democrat-sponsored bill protecting net neutrality was rejected in committee today by a 34-22 vote. Said House committee has a Republican majority, so the amendment by Ed Markey (MA-D) was unlikely to make it out alive, but five Democrats - including Congressional Black Caucus members Edolphus Towns, Albert Wynn, and Bobby Rush still felt the need to cross the aisle and vote with the Republicans. Throw in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus' Charlie Gonzales and four out of five of the ATT Five are members of the Hill's civil right's caucuses. What gives? What gives is that these four made the cynical and depressing calculation that black and Latino folks don’t care about or follow telecom/internet regulation issues, giving them a free vote to toss the telecom lobby’s way. Besides being gutless, this vote puts Towns, Wynn and Rush’s constituencies at greater risk for higher internet bills and poorer service. Lots of folks have explained net neutrality better than I will be able to, but suffice to say that if telecoms are allowed to pin premium pricing schemes to the delivery of services they currently treat "neutrally" (delivering you this blog page vs. a video download vs. an e-commerce site vs...) black consumers will be among the first to get fucked.

This is an important issue which has been deservedly getting a fair amount of attention in the liberal blogosphere. It was very cool to see an African American perspective on the Democratic failure to prevent the Republican majority from selling out netizens' access to the unfettered bandwidth we thought we were paying for.