Congress seems to have ended its involvement in the long-running network-neutrality debate by declaring its own neutrality in the matter.

As my colleague Cecilia Kang reported Wednesday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) gave up on his efforts to pass a net-neutrality bill after failing to get any Republican backing for a compromise he had been crafting.

That should not have surprised anybody. The chances of any bipartisan bills passing have plummeted as we near an election that will probably leave the GOP in a stronger negotiating position- after which those chances should drop to approximately zero.

But the need to make a decision on net neutrality hasn't disappeared just because our legislative body now finds it too difficult to legislate.

The issue here is simple: Should the government prevent Internet providers from discriminating for or against legitimate sites, services and applications?

That's not a theoretical risk. Telecommunications firms and some networking experts have argued for the right to charge other sites more for faster delivery of their data or put the brakes on some online uses that they feel clog their networks.

Letting providers charge some sites for access to the passing lane or push the data of others off to the slow lane is not how the Internet was designed to operate, or how Internet service has traditionally been provided.

Having to pay extra for preferred or assured access to an Internet provider's customers might not make much of a difference to Web companies that already dominate their markets, but it would greatly complicate the task of start-ups.

Customers, in turn, would have minimal recourse, thanks to the lack of competition in many local broadband markets.

Fortunately, few companies have even tried tampering with their users' connections in these ways. And those that have, such as Comcast in 2007 and RCN this spring, didn't think enough of their experiments to tell their customers about them in advance.

Even telecom firms that oppose net-neutrality regulation say they would continue to treat legitimate sites and services equally anyway. (One reason: They could still charge individual customers more for using excess bandwidth or otherwise imposing a disproportionate hit on their networks.)

Some, such as Verizon Wireless and AT&T, have already committed to neutrality obligations imposed in wireless-spectrum sales or merger approvals.