Politicians v. the Web

It's simply astounding to me what politicians are capable of voting for. Daily Kos' highly-recommended diary entry for the day was one by blue meme titled "Snuck it past us: House subcommittee voted to kill Internet." I hope s/he won't mind if I quote liberally from the post:

There has been so much going on lately with plans to nuke Iran and the like, that a major story seems to have slipped under the radar for the entire blogosphere.We've been jawing for weeks about the plans that Big Telecom have for discriminating between the bits they like and the bits they don't flowing through their pipes into our houses. Last week Matt @ MyDD flagged the very dangerous bill working through the House right now.That bill took a big step toward being enacted into law last week, and it seems nobody noticed.

The San Francisco Chronicle provides the details:

A House subcommittee handed phone companies a victory Wednesday by voting 27-4 to advance a bill that would make it easier for them to deliver television service over the Internet and clearing the way for all Internet carriers to
charge more for speedier delivery.

The lopsided vote was a defeat for Internet and technology firms like Google and Microsoft, which had hoped to amend the bill to enforce a principle called network neutrality and preserve the status quo under which all Internet traffic is treated equally.

Earlier in the day, the subcommittee voted 23-8 to reject an amendment by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that would have inserted specific language designed to enforce network neutrality and prevent the feared creation of fast and slow lanes on the Internet.

Markey said his amendment was necessary to protect the "Internet as an engine of innovation" and
ensure that new services had an equal chance to sprout.
...
Supporters painted defeat of Markey's net neutrality amendment in bleak terms.

"Members from both sides of the aisle endorsed a plan which will permit cable and phone companies to construct 'pay as you surf, pay as you post' toll booths for the Internet," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington.

But Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies for the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, dismissed concerns that the proposed bill would lead to a two-tiered Internet.

"There's plenty of competition," Arrison said. "The market will take care of it."

Don't they have more important things to be doing than impeding the democratic nature of the Internet? It's like they deliberately sit around on the Hill thinking up ways to fix things that don't require fixing, and completely
neglect those that are crying out for attention. (Re: The Deficit? Foreign policy? Healthcare? Bush's Incompetence?)

It's astounding, really, how poorly they manage the country's priorities. And truly upsetting that there's a chance a measure like the one described above could actually be written into law. I don't care if the "market will take care of it"--that's not the point. Why not just add Senator Markey's clause in as a precaution? Even if you believe the market will work its magic (which as blue meme points out, it often fails to do), just sign it into law to send the big bad telecom folks a message: the Internet will remain network neutral and democratic.