House OKs ban on per-minute 'Net access fees

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Tuesday prohibiting the Federal Communications Commission from imposing per-minute access fees on Internet users.

The legislation, which ignores the fact that the FCC is already opposed to such fees, was intended to defuse a long-running rumor and to stroke the technology lobby as part of the Republican House leadership's flashy "eContract 2000."

Federal lawmakers have been plagued for years by angry constituents complaining about a rumor involving a fictitious congressman named Tony Schnell, who was pushing for a steep monthly surcharge - as much as $40 - on Internet access services. A strident e-mail bouncing around the Internet, curiously titled, "The Search for Truth," promulgated the rumor.

"Although there is no such bill and no such congressman ... the House of Representatives has taken the appropriate step to ensure that such access fees never materialize," said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.

The bill, which passed the House on a voice vote, fulfills one of the tenets of eContract 2000, which is the GOP's latest demonstration of fidelity to the tech lobby. The bill joins a House measure passed last week that extended for five years an existing moratorium on e-commerce sales that was to have expired in October 2001.

But ironically, an amendment quietly inserted into that bill last week has antagonized some members of the Internet community, creating a minor controversy. The new language exempts access charges on Internet telephony from the overall access-charge ban.

A spokesman for BellSouth (BLS) said Tuesday that his company favors the levying of access charges on Internet telephony, while a Bell Atlantic (BEL) spokeswoman said her company supports the legislation passed on Tuesday. For its part, the FCC says it has no intention of imposing access charges on Internet telephony.

The failure of the House to codify such a ban angered some in the Internet telephony industry.

"The special interests - in this case the legacy telephone companies - are legislating their own corporate welfare," says Jan Horsfall, CEO of PhoneFree.com. "The whole bill is pretty innocuous, except for the last paragraph. It's pretty shocking. It's like a wolf in sheep's clothing."

A bill pending before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee would extend the tax moratorium and ban Internet access charges, with no special exception for Internet telephony. Horsfall vowed to "get together a coalition to kill" any such exception.

"The telecom lobby in Washington is bigger than the arms lobby or the tobacco lobby," says Jeff Pulver, CEO of Pulver.com, who is planning a Million Nerd March in the nation's capital on June 11. "We need to move from being behind computer screens and on the other end of telephone lines into the daylight."

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