eBay CEO Meg Whitman, for example, reportedly e-mailed more than one million of the company's members seeking their support of Net Neutrality. Google boss Eric Schmidt (pictured) released an open letter on the eve of the Houe vote stating that "the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight." And no less a personage than Web creator Tim Berners-Lee spoke of entering a "dark period" if telcos are allowed to set traffic priorities among their customers.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was more flamboyant, stating that "when Lewis and Clark made their historic journey of discovery two centuries ago, information could only travel at the speed of the fastest horse. Now information travels in an instant. And just as railroads and highways did in the past, broadband has dramatically increased the productivity and efficiency of our economy and will continue to do so in the future. It has created jobs today, and will create even more jobs tomorrow."

Pelosi (pictured) said that HR5252 "strikes at the heart of the free and equal nature of the Internet and would fundamentally change the way the Internet currently works. America's small businesses and entrepreneurs could be left in the slow lane with inferior Internet service, unable to compete with the big corporations that can pay Internet providers toll charges to be in the fast lane. Bloggers, our citizen journalists, could be silenced by skyrocketing costs to post and share video and audio clips."

The brouhaha comes in the wake of FCC decisions dating to 2002, when it first allowed telcos to restrict access to who canuse their DSL lines, a decision upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Then last August, the regulatory body, under new Chairman Kevin Martin (who replaced Colin Powell's son Michael Powell), put telcos' broadband networks on the same playing field as cable modems and issued a generalistic list of consumer's rights to choose. The current Congressional debate is aimed to define specifically what all this means to business and consumers.

Suderman, quoted above, sides with the opponents of "Net Neutrality," also known as the proponents of "Consumer Choice." He released a statement congratulating House members who voted against Markey's amendment, saying that "despite a considerable volume of misleading rhetoric from proponents of neutrality legislation, House members were able to see the provisions for what they were – a regulatory power grab that would have made the disastrous error of putting the federal government in charge of managing Internet traffic."

Two other commentators should probably be left to have the last words (at least for the time being) regarding the debate. SYS-CON's Web 2.0 Journal Editor-in-Chief Dion Hinchliffe, who is based in the Washington, DC area, said "the Internet has always been at the mercy of the kindness of strangers, and Net Neutrality has been a kind of benevolent phantasm that many people believe actually exists today. It doesn't. Desirable as true neutrality would be however, explicitly eliminating it would be a minor disaster for the global user base of the Internet, but one that it would probably route around eventually."

Add to this PC Magazine Columnist and blogger John C. Dvorak's (pictured) ever-so-slightly jaundiced take: "The problem with Net Neutrality is that it's basically idealistic since it assumes the ill-informed public-at-large actually cares about the issue. It also assumes that officials are not bought and sold by the big carriers. I don't think it has much of a chance."