Yesterday a Net Neutrality amendment to a larger telecommunications bill did not make it out of committee. I never had much faith in Congress to come up with common-sense regulation that would prevent the telecommunications companies from abusing their customers, but I think that the fight was important anyway. It enabled people to state their principles and attract a lot of attention to a technical issue that’s really pretty obscure.

Now if telcos start abusing the fact that they own the last mile, there’s enough of an awareness of the problem that activists can go out and put pressure on them to stop. Had activists not waged this fight, they wouldn’t be very well positioned to fight subsequent customer-hostile actions by the telcos. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not despairing the temporary end of the legislative fight, and that I think a lot of valuable work was done despite the fact that we didn’t achieve the outcome we wanted.