It is is a pretty large cap, but it’s clearly designed to profit from high-bandwidth users. There’s nothing inherently wrong with charging bandwidth hogs for their capacity; plenty of businesses charge on such a consumption model. The issue comes when this directly affects the ability of video-streaming sites like Netflix to carry out their business model, because of the cost-prohibitive nature of the service for individual users. Just three hours of HD video on Netflix would wipe out the entire 150GB monthly limit, for example.

In a press briefing on the situation in Egypt (and probably his last briefing ever), Robert Gibbs made a stunning, but important statement:

We believe in the basket of individual freedoms includes the freedom to access the Internet and the freedom to use social networking sites.

Gibbs did not say (and none of the reporters asked) whether this includes access to the Wikileaks site. Or whether it includes access to the Internet at broadband speeds.

No member of Congress is beyond reproach. Every member of Congress should be open scrutiny of their record, and every member should be judged by his or her record. It’s critical to an effective democracy.

Last week, Congressman Bobby Rush’s record of carrying water for big telecom corporations — at the expense of the communities he represents — came back to haunt him when he lost his bid to become Ranking Member of the subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet. Rep. Rush had been almost certain to get the position until more than 16,000 ColorOfChange.org members opposed his candidacy because of his record of advocating against net neutrality.

You can say that the entire goal of Julius Genachowski’s pretend plan for net neutrality was to devise something that the telecoms could live with, while allowing him to make a defense that the Obama Administration fulfilled its campaign promise of Internet freedom. If they didn’t care about being taken to court over their plans, they would have written something far more air-tight. So instead, they came up with this heavily compromised approach. And Verizon sued them anyway.

Earlier today, the FCC and the Justice Department ruled in favor of the merger between Comcast and NBC Universal, creating one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and setting an unadvisable template for one company to combine the power of media and the Internet.

Sen. Al Franken, who has been a lonely critic of the proposed merger, released a caustic statement on the FCC action today.

You see, it’s okay for the telecoms to block or throttle wireless access, because the openness of the Android operating system will magically cancel out any closedness of the spectrum. Awesome!

The FCC officially approved rules that reportedly provide net neutrality protections to wireline Internet but not wireless services, and which include a host of loopholes for both types of service.

The FCC allowing AT&T and friends to write the new rules for Internet access recalls what happened when California handed the pen to Enron and friends in writing rules for electricity markets. Deja vu all over again

I mentioned yesterday that the FCC hearing on net neutrality would be streamed live this morning, but the drama was removed from the proceedings last night, when Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn announced, with some reluctance, that they would support Julius Genachowski’s pretend net neutrality plan. We have terrible broadband in the US, and by all accounts, we’re now going to pay more for it, with less choice of content. It’s all very sad and I don’t know where the open Internet movement goes from here.

Two developments have started to fragment the Internet of late. One looks quite a bit more benign, but both threaten the openness that has been a hallmark of the connected world.