eBay diving into net neutrality: the million-member email

Meg Whitman swung the massive club of her one million-plus eBay membership today, calling on each of them individually to get involved in the net neutrality debate in a personally-addressed email. She argued against the doctrine of "pay to play" to use the "fast lane" of the internet and said, "The bottom tier -- the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information 'super-highway,' the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road." Her missive asked each member to follow a link to send an email to their congressperson.

The debate, which pitches the internet backbone providers (like Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner's cable unit) against the biggest bandwidth users (like eBay, Google, Amazon.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!) is growing more bitter by the minute. Whitman's atypical move of sending email to her many members is seen as an unconventional approach in a battle that, to date, has failed to explain itself well to voters; although investors, certainly, can understand that the potential for huge profits hang in the balance.