Speakers at an American Civil Liberties Union conference today praised legislation that would ban discrimination of Internet content by broadband companies, saying that firms like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon Communications -- not the government -- pose the greatest threat to free speech and expression online.

More than 1,000 members of the watchdog group are in Washington this week to lobby lawmakers on a host of issues. Congress and the FCC have before them proposals that would ensure so-called network neutrality, but Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn said she was not hopeful that either would result in a positive outcome for consumers. "Until we have a Congress and government that want to impose a non-discrimination principle -- and I don't think we have one right now -- it's up to you to bring this to folks' attention," she said.

House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Charles (Chip) Pickering, R-Miss., have sponsored an FCC-focused bill, while House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., have a measure that takes an antitrust approach toward ensuring network neutrality. Similar bills were introduced in the 109th Congress but were unsuccessful.

Times have changed since the Supreme Court struck down anti-obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act more than a decade ago, said Barry Steinhardt, who directs the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program. That was the "only fulsome attempt by Congress to regulate speech on the net and it failed," he said. Notably, broadband providers have portrayed net neutrality as a similarly heavy-handed approach, he added. Meanwhile, privacy expert Melissa Ngo warned that some Internet suppliers like Charter Communications in the United States and BT in Britain to engage in "deep packet inspection" -- a type of computer network filtering that examines components of Web transmissions as they pass an inspection point -- to build profiles of customers and target content and advertising accordingly.

Markey and Energy and Commerce ranking member Joe Barton questioned the legality of Charter's proposal in a May letter to CEO Neil Smith. The letter argued that federal law bans firms that offer cable services from disclosing subscribers' personally identifiable information without prior consent. Charter, which had planned to deploy the network inspection in the coming months, has backed off of its initial timetable, Ngo said. The proposal poses "grave privacy violations" and First Amendment issues, she added. A Markey spokeswoman said today a meeting between her boss, Barton, and Charter officials will take place "in the next few weeks."