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In an effort to protect net neutrality, Senators Bryon Dorgan and Olympia Snowe have sent a letter to Sen. Daniel Inouye, who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, requesting a hearing for the discussion of phone and cable companies’ non-compliance with net neutrality. This specifically concerns Verizon, AT&T and Comcast.

You may remember that Verizon blocked text messages from a pro-abortion organization, and Sen. Dorgan was again at the helm, bringing this to the attention of the public and pushing a bill for more regulation regarding wireless services. AT&T faced similar accusations when Pearl Jam’s concert seemed blocked for similar reasons. And most recently, Comcast was found blocking P2P services like BitTorrent.

Below is a portion of the text from the letter:

Over the past several months there have been incidents that have raised serious concern about the phone and cable companies’ power to discriminate against content. Just recently, Verizon Wireless arbitrarily chose to block a series of text messages on the grounds that the subject matter was too controversial.

While the carrier, to its credit, reversed this decision, this illustrates its power as a content gatekeeper. Then came the news that AT&T reserves the right in its Terms of Service to discontinue service of customers that criticize the company. And just last week, we saw reports of Comcast interfering with the popular file-sharing service BitTorrent.

All of these developments, Mr. Chairman, suggest that the Committee needs to consider the issue of content discrimination and investigate these incidents further if they were based on legitimate business and network management policies or part of practices that would be deemed unfair and anti-competitive.

The phone and cable companies have previously stated that they would never use their market power to operate as content gatekeepers and have called efforts to put rules in place to protect consumers “a solution in search of a problem.”

These recent events suggest that response is well short of being sufficient and this Congress should consider adopting targeted regulations to protect consumers and ensure an open and vibrant communications platform.

We request that the full Committee hold a hearing to discuss discrimination against content and applications by phone and cable companies, and whether current regulatory protections are enough.

[via webpronews]

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