The Senate failed to pass Senate Joint Resolution 6 today which would have led to overturning net neutrality rules issued by the Federal Communications Commission last December. It was a good political move by Senate Democrats to vote against the resolution. That’s all it really was.

Think about it. By voting against the resolution, the Democrats get to keep their street cred with the Occupy Wall Street-type left wingers that support regulating everything beyond time, place, and manner for a broadband access provider. They can say to Public Knowledge and Free Press, “See. We’re part of that 99%.”

The Democrats are probably betting on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to go and slap a sense of reality on the FCC and the Free Press posse. The court will repeat its earlier finding: that Congress has not given explicit authority to the FCC to promulgate these rules or redefine broadband access.

The FCC will be forced to ask Congress to draft rules saying as much, or worse yet, go all out and ask Congress to equate by statute broadband service and telecommunications services. It will be the only way that the FCC will get the authority to place even mo0re onerous regulation on broadband access.

Does the FCC want to do this during an election year? They’d have an easier time showing that Herman Cain didn’t harass any of his accusers.

One of my favorite telecommunications industry analyst, Scott Cleland, hits it out the park with his piece on net neutrality. On the eve of the U.S. Senate debate on whether the Federal Communications Commission’s rules on net neutrality should be repealed, Mr. Cleland lays out a clear, cogent argument for why these rules are a farce and should be repealed. Click here for the article.

I would add that while the FCC will argue from now until hell freezes over that they are not regulating the Internet, from a consumer perspective, the Internet is broadband access, and as far as the consumer is concerned, when you start talking about transparency of carrier operations surrounding broadband, that is the Internet. The consumer does not distinguish between the two.

The courts made it clear in Comcast v. FCC not to come back with this back door way of trying to extend jurisdiction thus regulation over broadband. The Congress views broadband access as the Internet and has made clear its intent not to have broadband access treated like a telecommunications service.

All the FCC’s net neutrality rules have done is potentially slow down investment in the deployment of broadband facilities. All the FCC’s net neutrality rules have done is threaten broadband deployment to unserved urban, insular, and rural communities by making carriers think twice about facing unnecessary and onerous costs of compliance with rules invented to address a problem that doesn’t exist.

How these rules aided in promoting our economy is beyond me. How these rules aided in ensuring that minorities get access to a necessary resource in the knowledge economy is beyond me. It’s like the Occupy Wall Street types took over the FCC for a brief moment, and now the U.S. Senate is in a position to evict their butts out of the park.

A new initiative launched by the Center for Media Justice called Black Voices for Internet Freedom, was launched yesterday for the purpose of putting real, outside-the-Beltway faces on the issue on Internet openness.

In general, any attempt to get more people online, especially people of color, is positive. I’m preaching to the choir when I say that the Internet provides a quick and efficient method to access and exchange information.

It is probably no coincidence that this initiative launched on the day that final net neutrality rules were posted in the Federal Register.

While the Center claims that this initiative is an outgrowth of a schism between traditional civil rights groups and Netroots activists, it sounds more like a clarion call to the troops in preparation both for legal challenges to net neutrality rules and efforts to leverage these rules as part of an overall strategy of intrusiveness.

Broadband access providers and their investors should expect this initiative to leave no rock unturned every time a consumer’s upload speed decreases by one or two bytes.

Informative piece in The New York Times describing how media and other content provider companies are teaming up with Internet service providers to clamp down digital piracy. Content companies will provide to Internet service providers evidence of illegal file sharing and the Internet service providers would send notifications to suspected violators.

I see a problem here for the net neutrality posse. Public Knowledge is concerned that consumers may be punished based on allegations that are not brought to a court.

Am I hearing right? Does Public Knowledge really want to slow down the process of battling theft of intellectual property by taking every allegation to court? That’s like telling Best Buy not to put sensors at their doors to warn them and customers that someone is walking out of the store with product they didn’t buy.

If the net neutrality posse really cares about consumers, they would want to avoid actions that would embarrass consumers. They would not want consumers expending money and time defending against prosecution. For consumers, this is a least-cost approach for stemming the tide of intellectual property theft.

Latoya Livingston shared her remarks on net neutrality before the Penn/Fordham Digital Diversity Workshop recently held in New York City.

Ms. Livingston lays out a cogent and valid argument for allowing strategic partnerships between minority content providers and broadband access providers. Her analysis that paid prioritized services for larger content providers will bring in greater revenues that can be used to pay for upfront network costs is also economically sound.

This market approach provides a faster and more efficient mechanism for promoting the adoption of broadband among minority communities while providing entrepreneurs access to broadband networks for delivery of their content.