If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you know I’m a big supporter of Net Neutrality. As a small-time blogger, I pretty much have to be. After all, without Net Neutrality, the powerful True North* could pay Comcast to slow down traffic to my blog so much it would become unreadable.

Al Franken has also been an outspoken proponent of Net Neutrality. Like me, he’s concerned about conservatives’ outlandish claims against it. Showing either a complete lack of understanding, or possibly a cynical desire to turn the Internet from the greatest tool for free speech ever made into a corporate-controlled money-sucking machine, they have claimed Net Neutrality is somehow a “government takeover” of the Internet.

In a statement on the Senate floor yesterday, Franken gave a clear, simple explanation of Net Neutrality that’s worth a read. The main point is, Net Neutrality is what we have now. All proponents want is to maintain the neutrality of the Internet.

Net neutrality is a simple concept.  It’s the idea that all content and applications on the Internet should be treated the same, regardless of who owns the content or the website.  This isn’t a very radical idea, and it certainly isn’t a new idea.  You may not realize it, but net neutrality is the foundation and core of how the Internet operates every day - and how it has always operated.

When scientists and engineers were creating the basic architecture of the Internet, they decided they needed to establish some basic rules of the road for Internet traffic.  One of the fundamental design principles of the Internet was that all data should be treated equally, regardless of what is being sent or who is sending it.  That is net neutrality, folks. 

It is the same principle you rely on every day when you use the Internet.  And it is the same principle that your phone companies must adhere to when they connect your phone calls.  They can’t discriminate based on what you say or who you call, and the founders of the Internet thought the same should be true about data traveling across networks.  Everything and everyone should be treated the same.

This principle of non-discrimination is baked into the DNA of the Internet.  This isn’t radical or new.  This is about having a platform that is free and open to all-regardless of whether you are a big corporation or a single individual, and regardless of whether you can pay a lot of money to speed up how fast your content gets to your customers.

Net neutrality is what we all experience today when we log on to our computers, and it is what we have always experienced since the very beginning of the Internet. 

I think it is important to focus on that point for a minute, because my opponents are telling you something different.  And they are wrong.  Net neutrality isn’t about a government takeover of the Internet.  And it isn’t about changing anything.  Net neutrality, and the rules that the FCC passed, are about keeping the Internet the way it is today, and the way it has always been. 

We take for granted that we can access Google’s search engine as easily as we can access Yahoo or Bing.  Or that Netflix videos download as easily as the videos your friends uploaded onto YouTube last night.  We expect that emails arrive at their destinations at the same speed, regardless of who is sending them.   And we take for granted that the website for your local pizzeria loads as fast as the website for Dominos or Pizza Hut.

Senator Franken thinks Net Neutrality is important for the future of business. I agree wholeheartedly. Let’s take Franken’s example of Netflix. Sometime within the next few years, a worthy competitor to Netflix will arrive. Without Net Neutrality, Netflix could team up with service providers to slow down that competitor’s service to the point where its videos would no longer work.

Netflix is just one of a million possible examples. The point is, a failure to maintain Net Neutrality would squelch competition and innovation on the Internet, all in the name of corporate profit.

*I kid, I kid.