The SavetheInternet coalition turned one year old this week and celebrated with... a press conference. While not the single most exciting approach to birthday parties the world has ever seen, a press conference provided an opportunity to reflect on all that has happened regarding network neutrality in only a year. It also provided a powerful reminder of why CEOs like AT&T's Ed Whitacre need to watch their mouths.

Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), one of the driving forces behind the Senate's Dorgan/Snowe Net neutrality bill, joined the call to offer his thoughts on why a bill is needed. He recalled reading a quote last year from Ed Whitacre in BusinessWeek in which Whitacre complained about companies that used "his pipes" and did so "for free." That moment was illuminating for Dorgan. Even though he was raised in a small town (cue standard politician story about hardscrabble upbringing here), Dorgan said that "I can understand a pretty significant threat to the open architecture of the Internet." He thanked the coalition for its work, and said that he would seek hearings on the issue in the Senate Commerce Committee in the next few months.

Craig Newmark, who identified himself as the "customer service" person for Craigslist, took the microphone next. "The Internet has always been about playing fair," he said, adding that he hears from plenty of telecom employees who don't support what their bosses have said. Pretty much everyone is for net neutrality, Newmark said, except people running "fake grassroots campaigns and that sort of thing."

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia who has been heavily involved in this issue, pointed out how much progress had been made in a year. We're now seeing a "sea change in telecom policy," he said, pointing out that Net neutrality has become an issue that people truly care about. It's become one of the first "third rails" in telecom policy, he said—any politician who comes near it gets "shocked by the electric reaction they receive from the public."

But perhaps most surprising was Michele Combs of the Christian Coalition, who claimed that Net neutrality had become a "true family issue." Who would have thought that standing up for traditional marriage and for unfettered access to Google would be two of the Christian Coalition's main issues in the upcoming presidential race? But that's exactly what's happening. Combs said that neutrality is "number two on our agenda" now, in large part because her group represents 100,000 churches, most of whom now use the web for everything from posting sermons to hosting online calendars to running e-mail lists. The churches fear that, without Net neutrality, it could get harder to access and distribute certain kinds of content.

The conference illustrated one of the movement's biggest successes, which has been its ability to assemble a truly diverse coalition that includes both the Christian Coalition and MoveOn.org, Craigslist and US senators. With Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) set to introduce a neutrality bill in the House shortly, the issue promises to get a thorough hearing during this session of Congress.