BURBANK, Calif. -- The Walt Disney Co. said Monday its TV group plans to offer four ABC prime-time shows including "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" online for free beginning in May.

The offerings will also include current episodes of "Commander in Chief," as well as the entire season of "Alias," and will be available through June.

The shows, being offered by the Disney-ABC Television Group, will be supported by advertisers, including AT&T Inc., Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble Co., Toyota Motor Corp. and Unilever PLC, among others.

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Toll booths might start popping up on the information superhighway.

As Internet traffic starts to clog, the telephone and cable companies that control the nation's telecommunications networks are considering charging dot-coms such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. extra to make sure their data gets special treatment -- zooming along faster and more reliably than anyone else's.

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By James S. Granelli, L.A. Times (registration req.)

The highly charged populist uprising over who owns the Internet lost its first significant battle when a U.S. House of Representatives committee voted down legislation that would block phone companies from establishing an Internet toll system for companies such as Google and Skype.

While rejecting the toll-blocking amendment, the committee approved legislation that would free the phone companies from the time-consuming and expensive process of seeking permission from thousands of municipalities to offer pay-TV services.

Link Red Herring

A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee has rejected a proposal to strengthen provisions in a telecommunications reform bill that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or impairing competing Web content and applications.

The Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday rejected an amendment to strengthen so-called net neutrality provisions in a telecom reform bill largely focused on creating a national video franchising system for Internet television services.

Link Grant Gross, Info World

Lawmakers in Congress are scheduled to vote today on a landmark bill that consumer advocates and some of the biggest names in the tech world say would change the Internet as we know it, creating fast lanes and slow lanes for Web access.

The issue of so-called net neutrality, as in network neutrality, is at the heart of legislation that represents the most sweeping overhaul of telecom law since the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Link David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle

WASHINGTON -- One of the major sticking points over legislation easing phone companies' entry into the video market involves a policy that is little understood by some lawmakers. It's a policy that means different things to different people but has a passionate appeal.

It's called "net neutrality," and the debate over it went into high gear Thursday during a House Commerce Committee legislative hearing. Arguing the issues were executives from network companies like Verizon, Internet goods movers like Amazon and lawmakers from both parties. The legislation is being pushed by committee chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas.

Link: By Brooks Boliek, The Hollywood Reporter

A former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission is calling for a fact-based solution to the Net neutrality issue, to be determined by a neutral group of experts, meeting out of the glare of the current hype.

Link By Carol Wilson, Telephony Online

Internet companies yesterday criticized legislation that would give the Federal Communications Commission only limited ability to stop phone and cable companies from blocking access to Web sites, saying the proposal would endanger the open nature of the Web.

Link By Arshad Mohammed, Washington Post

More than half of New Orleans still doesn't have phone or Internet access. But that isn't stopping BellSouth from campaigning to shut down a free Wi-Fi service that has become a lifeline for thousands of residents, the city's top technology officer says.

State laws ban municipalities from giving away broadband services. The city got around the ban because the governor declared a state of emergency after Hurricane Katrina. The state of emergency is expected to be lifted this year. When that happens, the broadband network would have to shut down.

Link By Leslie Cauley, USA Today

Tim Berners-Lee, chief architect of the World Wide Web, says his world-changing invention would no longer be an "open information space" if broadband providers abandoned the principle of Net neutrality.

Link By Tyler Hamilton, Toronto Star