The Tuesday hearing of the Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Task Force reunited advocates for net neutrality and opponents to it, discussing whether antitrust law needs to be amended so that Internet traffic should remain free of favored treatment from broadband providers.

Among the names present at the hearing were YouTube’s musical phenomenon, OK Go, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Christian Coalition of America, as well as the Songwriters Guild of America, some pro-, some against net neutrality.

While the Songwriters Guild of America representative Rick Carnes complained about how P2P is affecting songwriters and how instead of opting for neutrality, they should figure out ways to stop unauthorized downloads or uploads, OK Go went on to praising net neutrality, which established them as a music band and got their first records sold.

Damian Kulash, lead singer and guitarist of OK Go said in his testimony: “There is a real consensus with us that Net Neutrality is good for music. I’m here to ask Congress today to preserve Net Neutrality and the future of the Internet.”

At the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union’s representative Caroline Fredrickson said in her testimony: “Neutrality promotes open discourse. Consumers decide what sites to access, among millions of choices, and “pull” information from sites rather than having information chosen by others “pushed” out to them, as with television and other media in which the content is chosen by the broadcaster.”

The Christian Coalition of America also stood against blocking or limiting internet access, as that could stop users from continuing to “use the Internet … without a phone or cable company snooping in our communications and deciding whether to allow a particular communication to proceed… We are here today to say, network operators are blocking political speech.’”

They also exemplified the actions of Verizon, AT&T or Comcast who blocked or banned Internet content: “These rather stark instances of censorship in the face of very close public scrutiny highlight the need for Congressional action.”

Committee chairman John Conyers also said in his opening statement that he believed that “antitrust law is the most appropriate way to deal with this problem – and antitrust law is not regulation … The antitrust laws can help maintain a free and open Internet.”