Defending Tomorrow's Internet

— -- Federal law already protects your right to an open Internet. So why are some companies pushing suspicious new regulations?

The issue involves so-called Net neutrality, but for millions of consumers, it's really an important lesson in how looks can be deceiving.

Today, the Senate Commerce Committee is scheduled to vote on several proposals to update the nation's communications laws. Unfortunately, among many beneficial improvements is an ill-defined proposal to mandate suffocating new federal regulations over the Internet.

If this passes, Amazon and other big online companies would gain a billion-dollar loophole to escape paying their portion of the huge deployment costs necessary for tomorrow's Internet.

If you want to understand why these companies are pushing so hard for these regulations, consider what tomorrow's Internet is going to look like. You'll enjoy movies, high-def TV, 3-D gaming, and other data-rich services zipping into your living room. Doctors will watch and give real-time advice during surgeries thousands of miles away. Distance education will blossom.

However, the lynchpin of all these benefits is a cutting-edge communications system. Deploying this system is exceedingly expensive - tens of billions of dollars - and America is already far behind many other nations.

That's where the problem with these new federal regulations comes in. Internet service providers only have limited options to recoup their huge investment. One obvious option is the online companies that will use these networks to maintain their sky-high stock prices. But these proposed new regulations would essentially prohibit such arrangements - and shift huge deployment costs onto consumers.

Now you know why those big online companies are pushing this issue! In the name of "neutrality," they have a sneaky way to get Congress to regulate their competitors and reduce their own expenses at consumers' expense.