UPDATE:
August 4, 2006: The PDF brochure has been removed from the Senate Commerce Committee website. Why put it up and then take it down? What was the purpose of this brochure?
Does anyone else find this fascinating [PDF]? That a congressional committee would put a brochure together to promote its own legislation?
The Senate Communications Bill Brochure lists the number of issues that the bill addresses: War on Terrorism, Universal Service Reform, Video Content (including broadcast flag), Competition and Consumer Choice in Video, Municipal Broadband, Wireless Innovation Networks, Digital Television, Protecting Children, Net Neutrality, and Additional Consumer Benefits.
It provides a number of choice quotes from editorials from major newspapers on the issue of net neutrality, and finally a short list of supporters of the bill (a longer list linked to in the brochure can be found here). Also at the bottom of that page is a MS Word doc entitled: “A LIGHTER TOUCH ON NET NEUTRALITY,” which contains the full versions of the editorials quoted in the brochure.
So here are few questions:
Has a congressional committee itself (not a lobbyist or public interest org) ever advocated for a piece of legislation with a promotional brochure?
Is this a proper role of a committee?
What would members of the committee who didn’t vote for the legislation have to say about it?
The MS Word doc entitled
The MS Word doc entitled “A LIGHTER TOUCH ON NET NEUTRALITY” demostrates a very low level of technical familiarity by using a series of long strings of new, empty paragraphs to neatly position quotes on separate pages instead of simply using page breaks.