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.

(In Google's case, this lobbying effort is even more telling given a June 14 New York Times article on the company's expanding network of server farms, or what The Times calls its "secret weapon in its quest to dominate" tomorrow's Internet.)

Fortunately, remarkably diverse voices are speaking out against this unfair proposal. Listen to the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America, whose members are on the front lines (literally) of our communications system. CWA's president recently warned that if Congress approves so-called neutrality regulations, "the U.S. will fall even further behind the rest of the world [in broadband deployment], and our rural and low-income populations will wait even longer to enter the digital age."

Also opposing new federal regulations is LULAC, the nation's premier advocate for Hispanic Americans. LULAC recently urged Congress, "There is no need to come up with a solution to a problem that does not exist, especially when the 'solution' involves complex and potentially damaging regulations to the Internet."

Finally, independent technology experts such as David Farber ("Paul Revere of the digital revolution" according to Wired) are urging Congress to keep the Internet free from new federal strangleholds.

Earlier this month, in a remarkably bipartisan vote of 269 to 152, the U.S. House listened to these and other independent voices and rejected Internet regulations. Now it's the Senate's turn.

If you want to protect the Internet from complex and unnecessary federal regulations, I encourage to go to the Hands Off the Internet coalition website (www.handsoff.org) and send a message to your elected official.

As a recent Forrester Research analysis concluded, if these regulations become law, "Legal costs will shoot through the roof - draining the pockets of everyone involved." That may be great news for lawyers, but not for ordinary consumers who'll be forced to pick up the tab.