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INCOMPAS, the internet and competitive networks association (formerly COMPTEL), wants the House Communications Subcommittee to know just where it stands on paid prioritization: firmly against it. INCOMPAS said paid prioritization, an umbrella term that covers a variety of business plans involving charging for prioritizing web traffic, gives internet service providers the incentive to "monetize network congestions," leading to a world of fast and slow lanes where ISPs pick the winners and losers.

Here are just some of the issues as the capital and the nation focused on how better to protect online users' data in a world of almost universal collection and sharing. 

The National Telecommunications & Information Administration, the White House's chief telecommunications policy advisor, has launched a revamped BroadbandUSA website and broadband map. The site was first launched as part of the Obama Administration's broadband stimulus funding initiative. That stimulus funding ran out in 2015, and the Federal Communications Commission took over the broadband mapping info collection -- it just released a new map in February.

Comcast, Charter, and Cox have teamed up with ad sales company NCC Media to form a new division within NCC to design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across the country to participating NCC partners. The group will use non-personally identifying data and targeting capabilities to create advanced advertising products and will launch later in 2018. NCC is jointly owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox and provides national, regional and local marketers with advertising solutions that allow them reach consumers via TV programming and targeted online content on every screen.

Paid prioritization has become the third rail of net neutrality discussions, Comcast senior EVP David Cohen said, but it should not be. Cohen said he has had conversations with his industry, with tech companies and the Cisco’s of the world about the possibility of agreeing to a prohibition on paid prioritization with a limited exception for specialized services that do not travel on the public internet, though he said that was not an official Comcast proposal.

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit will be hearing the appeals of the Federal Communications Commission's Restoring Internet Freedom order. That court has principal jurisdiction over FCC decisions. The court heard the two previous appeals -- of the 2011 Open Internet Order, which it overturned, and the 2015 Open Internet Order, which it upheld. The Judicial Conference lottery, which is held when appeals are filed in multiple venues, had chosen the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but there had been a motion, unopposed, to instead consolidate the cases in the DC Circuit.