The good news is that he’s on his way out as chair of the Commerce Committee. The new Democratic majority means new committee leadership, and right now it looks like Daniel Inouye (HI) will be taking up the top spot on the Commerce Committee. Inouye is a supporter of net neutrality, so things are looking a little better for our cause these days.

I think that educating our governing officials may ultimately be pointless. The ones who favor breaking net neutrality do so because the big telecommunications companies that donate to their campaigns tell them to. The targets for outreach should be conservative voters.

Conservatives are supposed to favor small government and deregulation. Voters who feel strongly about those notions need to understand that the net was created to be neutral to different kinds of information from different providers. Doing anything else involves imposing regulations and new infrastructure to support the change. And it’s not a change that serves the interests of the American people. Its only purpose is to enrich the telco giants by letting them pick the pockets of consumers and content providers.

A lot of centrist and liberal voters already oppose attempts to break net neutrality based on the civil liberties and freedom-of-speech problems such an action would cause. If conservatives were also rallied to the cause by framing it as a matter of excessive (and corrupt) regulation of the free market, the bipartisan momentum could finally crush the efforts of the anti-neutrality forces once and for all.