By Mark Pattison
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Politics makes for strange bedfellows, and the ongoing debate in Congress over "net neutrality" is just the latest example.

The U.S. bishops are for net neutrality. So are the Christian Coalition, the Gun Owners of America and Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, as well as large Internet content providers such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.

In the other corner are the Internet service providers -- large telephone and cable companies -- whose lines are used by Internet content providers on one end, and the citizenry represented by such groups as the U.S. bishops, the Christian Coalition and the Gun Owners of America on the other end.

Net neutrality, short for network neutrality, is the current protocol governing Internet traffic. If an Internet user wants to look at any online site, he or she can access it with roughly the same ease as anything else that's online -- presuming the site's host can smoothly direct whatever traffic comes its way.

Current telecommunications law being rewritten in Congress makes no mention of net neutrality as a standard. The Senate Commerce Committee was to vote on a bill June 22; a House version of the bill, which contained no net neutrality enforcement provisions, passed earlier in June.

"There is nothing to stop cable and phone companies from not allowing you to access speech that they oppose!" said a June 12 "action alert" e-mail from Christian Coalition president Roberta Combs. "Under these new rules, an Internet service provider with a pro-choice board of directors could decide that they will not allow a pro-life group to have access to its network ... or allow you to access their information!"

Combs listed eight Republican senators as "top priority" contacts on the issue, complete with fax numbers and the phone number of the Capitol switchboard.

Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of Tucson, Ariz., chairman of the bishops' Committee on Communications, using more measured tones in a May 23 letter to each House member, said: "Unless there are in place protections against Internet access providers' control over content, noncommercial religious speech on the Internet is threatened."

Bishop Kicanas added, "The Internet was constructed as a unique medium without the editorial control functions of broadcast television, radio or cable television. The Internet is open to any speaker, commercial or noncommercial, whether or not the speech is connected financially to the company providing Internet access, whether it is popular or prophetic. Those characteristics make the Internet critical to noncommercial religious speakers."

Without a net neutrality mandate, an Internet service provider could, in theory, charge premiums both to consumers who want to access certain sites and to Internet content providers for speedy access to the sites they control.

"It seems they want to double dip -- get paid by consumers so consumers can access Web sites and get paid by Web sites so Web sites can access consumers," said Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps, a Catholic, in an April 3 policy speech in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Md.

There are other dangers if net neutrality vanishes, according to a June 13 essay in The Hill, a Capitol Hill daily newspaper, written by Jenny Toomey and Michael Bracy, executive director and policy director, respectively, of the Future of Music Coalition.

"What would happen if Sony paid Comcast so that sonymusic.com would run faster than iTunes or, more important, faster than cdbaby.com -- where over 135,000 indie artists sell their music?" they asked. "Would a new form of Internet payola emerge, with large Internet content providers striking business deals with the dominant Internet service providers?"

Phone and cable companies deride net neutrality as a solution in search of a problem, pointing out that Google charges Web sites a premium for appearing at the top of a Google search. They also contend premiums may be necessary to fund construction of the so-called "Internet of the future," a sprawling nationwide network of broadband connectivity linking virtually everyone in America.

Critics counter that phone and cable companies have been dawdling for years on creating the broadband network, a faster system with a higher capacity for carrying information.

"The last time I checked, we were 16th in the world and free-falling" in broadband connectivity, Copps said April 3. Rural Americans and poor Americans have the worst connectivity rates of all.

It may be relatively simple for a consumer to go from Microsoft to Earthlink to NetZero or a host of other Internet content providers to get information. But because of the territorial monopolies granted to companies in local franchise agreements, there are far fewer choices of Internet service providers -- which provide the access to the Internet in the first place. Mergers between SBC Communications and AT&T and between Verizon and MCI have likewise narrowed the number of broadband providers.

Some municipalities are making efforts to build their own broadband networks to counter Internet service providers slow to build these networks, but they have been attacked on the grounds that governments are competing unfairly. A dozen states now have laws banning governments from building broadband networks.

Pope Benedict XVI hasn't directly commented on this issue, but in his Jan. 24 message marking the 40th anniversary of World Communications Day, he said, "As a public service, social communication requires a spirit of cooperation and co-responsibility with vigorous accountability of the use of public resources and the performance of roles of public trust ... including recourse to regulatory standards and other measures or structures designed to effect this goal."

Copyright (c) 2006 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops