WASHINGTON – Olympia J. Snowe is an unlikely Internet heroine.

The 59-year-old Republican senator from Maine isn’t among the 170 Capitol Hill lawmakers who occasionally meet as part of the Congressional Internet Caucus. Her home state has no major technology company headquarters. In fact, she cops to not even being proficient at surfing the Web.

But Snowe has emerged as one of the key leaders in a legislative battle over toll lanes on the Internet.

Bucking her own party leadership, she has championed the push by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and other Internet giants to prohibit phone and cable TV companies from charging Web sites for faster delivery of their data. The issue, known as network neutrality, threatens to kill a wide-ranging telecommunications bill that Senate leaders hope to pass this fall.

The legislation would make it easier for phone companies such as Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. to offer TV service. Supporters say the ability to package voice, video and data would encourage phone companies to spend more on their networks. They say cable TV companies would be forced to do the same, with the increased competition lowering bills and expanding high-speed Internet access nationwide.

At least that’s the hope.

Snowe acknowledges that Maine desperately needs more broadband access, but says those lines won’t be worth much if network operators can dictate whose data flow through them – and at what speed.

Without new regulations, she fears that phone and cable executives would create an Internet class system. Wealthy companies would pay to send video and other data-heavy applications on the Internet’s fast lane, she said, while startups would be relegated to something that resonates with a lifelong Maine resident – an online dirt road.

“We don’t want to curtail the innovation that has emerged on the Internet,” Snowe said. “We want to continue to encourage and nurture and cultivate that innovation and entrepreneurial spirit.”

Small companies are important to Snowe, who chairs the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee. The online fates of those companies, not Internet giants, have motivated her push for anti-discrimination regulations, she said.

“The Googles and Yahoos will take care of themselves,” Snowe said. But small entrepreneurs looking to launch innovative Web services, such as YouTube, would be at the mercy of phone and cable companies, who could charge “a mighty fee” for fast content delivery, she said.

Snowe and Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, D-N.D., have sponsored legislation to prevent broadband providers from charging companies for preferential treatment of content. The pair failed in a tie vote in the Senate Commerce Committee in June to add the prohibitions to the telecommunications bill.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and other top Republicans strongly oppose the anti-discrimination regulations, arguing that they would prevent phone and cable companies from recouping the costs of expanding their networks.

Some online activists praised Snowe for a forceful and plain-spoken speech advocating for anti-discriminatory regulations during the committee’s deliberations.

“This is a little more rocket science than a lot of the other issues they work on, but I’ve been extremely impressed by her articulateness,” said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group that supports the regulations.

Eschewing technical descriptions, Snowe focuses on the effect on average Web users if phone and cable companies get their way.

“Consumers will have all the choices and selection of a former Soviet Union supermarket,” she told her committee colleagues. “They’ll have access to that supermarket, but what will be on the shelves will be limited and dismal.”

Snowe’s 15-minute speech didn’t deliver victory for her and Dorgan, but it still had an effect. Stevens responded with a rambling rebuttal in which he called the Internet “a series of tubes.” The statement has been roundly ridiculed online, fueling opposition to Stevens’ bill.

With most Senate Democrats insistent that the telecom bill must contain the anti-discrimination regulations, Snowe and Dorgan appear to have enough support to block the legislation this year unless a deal is struck.

Snowe’s views put her in a difficult but not unusual position – at odds with the Senate’s Republican leadership. A two-term moderate, Snowe has opposed her party on the size of tax cuts and efforts to privatize Social Security. That doesn’t hurt her in Maine, said Chris Potholm, a government professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

“The Maine voter has been conditioned to like independent candidates who stand up to their party and their president,” he said.

Snowe has been in politics most of her life. She became a state legislative staffer after graduating from the University of Maine, then was elected to office after personal tragedy struck. Her first husband, state Rep. Peter Snowe, was killed in a car accident in 1973. She was elected to fill his seat.

Snowe moved up to the U.S. House of Representatives five years later as the youngest Republican woman and first Greek American woman elected to Congress. She served there with John R. McKernan Jr., another Maine Republican. He was elected the state’s governor in 1987, and the two married in 1989.

Snowe says McKernan is the proficient Web surfer in their home, where they have a high-speed connection and a wireless network. She’s more adept at using her BlackBerry portable e-mail pager.

Snowe dipped into high-tech issues in 1996, the last time Congress passed major telecommunications legislation. She was a sponsor of the federal E-rate program, which subsidizes Internet connections for schools and libraries. Her motivation then, as now, was to make sure that there was a northern on-ramp for Maine on the information superhighway.

“For those of us in small states, we don’t want to be left behind,” she said.

Her experience with the E-rate program led Snowe to seize on the issue of Internet content discrimination when her staff first raised it earlier this year, she said.

Snowe faces re-election in November, and telephone and cable companies have been running TV ads in Maine to pressure her to support the telecommunications legislation.

“Net neutrality is nothing more than a scheme by the multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley tech companies to get you, the consumer, to pay more for their services,” says one ad by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association airing in Maine and elsewhere.

The strategy is unlikely to work, Potholm said. A poll in July showed Snowe leading her Democratic challenger, Jean Hay Bright, 68 percent to 10 percent. But Snowe may have some explaining to do to voters if she ends up helping to kill legislation that could increase high-speed Internet access in Maine.

Although the percentage of households that have Internet connections in Maine exceeds the national average, its mountains and far-flung rural communities leave it lagging behind in high-speed access. A 2006 study by Leichtman Research Group Inc. found that 31.2 percent of Maine households have broadband connections, compared with 35.1 percent nationwide.

“It’s no longer a desire or a want, it’s a necessity,” said Sam Elowitch, executive director of the Rural Broadband Initiative, a nonprofit group in Farmington, Maine. “If you’re going to compete in the global economy, you need access to high-speed Internet or you’re going to lose out to your competitors.”

He agreed with Snowe that network operators should not charge for high-speed content delivery. But Elowitch isn’t sure whether the issue is worth killing telecommunications legislation that would expand broadband deployment. “That’s a terrible dilemma,” he said.

Potholm said Maine voters probably wouldn’t penalize Snowe for her position, as long as she explained it in a way they could understand.

“That image of the superhighway and the dirt road would resonate in rural Maine,” he said. “It’s one that would fit her personality.”

Snowe believes that she’s on the right side of an abstract high-tech issue – one of the few she has tackled during nearly 12 years in the Senate.

“Once the ramifications are known, I think that people will really be outraged that all of a sudden you’re going to have private entities controlling the content and services that will be available to consumers on the high-speed Internet,” she said. “Consumers will not have free choice any longer.”