How Much Money Does It Take To Kill Net Neutrality?

We now know that Net Neutrality, even if what actually passed wasn't all that special, faces an uphill struggle to remain on the books, having been voted down at a House subcommittee yesterday. What caught my eye this morning was the amount of money involved, with the nation's biggest ISPs (AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon) giving out literally thousands of dollars to the committee members' campaigns. Rep. Fred Upton, for example, received some $94,000 from AT&T over the course of his congressional career. That's quite a bit of money, I think you'll agree, particularly given that he's not from a particularly expensive state (from a purchasing commercials and so forth point of view) in Michigan. So I've taken a few minutes to see just how much money the big ISPs have contributed to the members of Congress who voted to de-claw Net Neutrality. I've focused on three companies: Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. These are the biggest ISPs in the country. I've taken the past four election cycles (so, going back to the general election in 2004) and looked up how much money they've donated to the 15 congressmen who voted down Net Neutrality in the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. My assumption was that Net Neutrality has really only became an issue in the past few years, so going back four election cycles should be sufficient to see any sort of possible influence.

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