Senate Net Neutrality Vote Imminent [UPDATED]

The Senate Commerce Committee has been marking up the Net Neutrality bill, and a vote may come as early as this afternoon. (Here's what I had to say about it last week.) Save the Internet.com has an updated list of Commerce Committee members who are against Net Neutrality or are undecided on the issue. If either of your senators is on this list, please give them a call this afternoon to urge them to support Net Neutrality.

In other updates, Matt Stoller pointed out yesterday that Ted Stevens, chairman of the Commerce Committee, doesn't believe he has the votes to pass his bill when it comes up in the full Senate, so now is the time to pull out all the stops for Net Neutrality. (Just so this doesn't get too confusing, keep in mind that the Stevens bill undermines Net Neutrality. We're for Net Neutrality and against the bill.)

And for another explanation of how the telecoms want to change the way we interact with the Internet, check out this post from Save the Internet.com. It's describes a debate from a couple of weeks ago between Paul Misener of amazon.com and Mike McCurry, who's lately been spokesman for the telecom companies. This got a fair amount of blog coverage last week, but I don't think I ever talked about it myself. Misener provides an easy-to-understand explanation about how life on the Internet will change if the telecom companies get their way, and McCurry offers little beyond bluster to defend their position. It's a complicated issue with lots of confusion sowed by the telecoms, so if you'd like a little more clarification, here's your chance.

UPDATE--The vote on the Snowe-Dorgan Net Neutrality amendment was an 11-11 tie, so it wasn't added to the Stevens bill in committee. The whole thing rolls over onto the Senate floor without Net Neutrality provisions. This is bad news, but the silver lining is that just one more vote would've won the day. A little while ago, this was an obscure issue on which hardly anyone had an opinion. Momentum is certainly on the side of Net Neutrality. Save the Internet.com has more.