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. 

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Forget about everything you think may or may not be included in eventual legislation on Net Neutrality. Instead, let’s ask a simple question about the future of the Internet.

Thanks to conservative misinformation, there’s been a lot of nonsense tied in with the simple idea of Net Neutrality. Most of their claims about Net Neutrality aren’t based on anything to do with the policy itself, but with their assumption that the Obama administration is evil, and therefore will try to sneak something evil into the regulations. But let’s lot forget — absolutely no legislation has been written.

Let’s suppose that Congress were to pass a simple law enshrining one single principle. Which of the below do you think would best serve the American people?

1. Internet Service Providers may not block, restrict, slow down, or speed up individual web sites based on their content, ideology, subject matter, language, or any other reason.
2. ISPs may control users’ access however they like, including blocking, restricting, and slowing down certain web sites, and including charging premium prices to gain access to certain sites.

Option 1 is Net Neutrality. Strip away all of the nonsense conservatives are pretending would be a part of the bill. In its purest form, as a choice between option 1 and option 2, wouldn’t you prefer the option that gives the power to you, the consumer?

Author’s note: I originally wrote this article back in August. I’m reprinting it with a few changes because I think it’s still a good summary of the issue.

What is Net Neutrality? It’s very, very simple:

Net Neutrality means that Internet service providers may not discriminate between different kinds of content and applications online.

That’s it and that’s all.

What could happen without Net Neutrality? I’m going to pose a few hypothetical scenarios, and I want you to think about whether any of them would be acceptable to you. These would all theoretically be possible without Net Neutrality.

1. FOXNews.com pays your ISP (Internet Service Provider) millions of dollars to speed up their video content. The ISP decides to get that extra bandwidth by taking it from what had previously been allocated to MSNBC. MSNBC’s content slows down so much it becomes unusable, while FOX’s content plays instantly.

2. Claiming it needs to maximize its efficiency, your ISP decides to increase bandwidth to well-trafficked sites like FOXNews or MSNBC and stop serving small independent sites like The UpTake. Neither FOX nor MSNBC start streaming the gubernatorial debates.

3. Verizon Wireless blocks access to Google Maps, telling their customers that they can get better results from Verizon’s own VZ Navigator — only $10 per month!

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I can’t believe we’re even having this debate, but there are many out there who don’t believe free speech should be required on the Internet. They’re totally fine with allowing telecom monopolies to control what we’re allowed to see and how we’re allowed to see it. I agree with Al Franken — Net Neutrality is the most important free-speech issue of our time.

Can you imagine people arguing that phone companies should have the right to determine what phone numbers they’ll consent to connect you with? Maybe they’d argue that the phone companies should give clear service to large corporations, but small businesses that can’t pay huge ‘tolls’ should only be given static-filled, glitchy phone service. The premise seems absurd — but that’s exactly what many are saying about the Internet.

Why would we ever just blindly trust massive telecom companies to respect our right to free speech? There’s simply no reason for them to respect our rights when they can make extra profits by turning free speech into a commodity to be purchased, instead of an inalienable right. The only way to insure our free speech is to mandate by law that it be respected.