The Act was sponsored by Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX), Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), Rep. Charles Pickering (R-MS) and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL).
The COPE Act was passed by the full House on June 8, 2006; the Markey Amendment failed,[3][4] leaving the final bill without meaningful network neutrality provisions.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the Internet Nondiscrimination Act of 2006, and Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) were expected to introduce a bipartisan amendment supporting net neutrality when the Senate took up its own rewrite (the "Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006", aka S. 2686 [1] Archived 2016-07-04 at the Wayback Machine) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996[5] later that year.
The bill would have created a single set of national video franchising rules that permit competitors to enter the market without obtaining thousands of individual city-by-city agreements.
The bill was lobbied for by AT&T and received support from Verizon Communications[6][7] whilst organizations such as Save the Internet and Common Cause have opposed it.