There’s a long, complicated essay at the technology blog Liquid Culture considering the different (and contradictory) arguments made by net neutrality supporters. It’s a bit esoteric and philosophical, but it makes a clear point about why net neutrality is the problem, not the solution:

Net neutralism is in that sense a way to repress, or to postpone that which is unmanageable to the future. It is a safe assurance that the relative statelessness, facelessness and independence from commercial actors that the base structure of the Internet has been able to gain from will remain.

And I can definitely understand them. But the problem is that current services like for example BitTorrent after all create bottlenecks, which affect all users when some users download terabytes of pornography and computer games. The Internet isn’t a superhighway, it is pipes after pipes which all have limited capacity. When they are full, they are full. And you have to wait. If the large majority of consumers want to have that mythological future, repeatedly said to be around the corner, where we can have immediate video conferences and get streams of (undeniably DRM-packaged) HD video directly into our living rooms, well then we also have to grab the bull by the horns and realize that the options we make today in fact might be a side-track which would take us far from the initial idea of the Internet, historically speaking.

In short, net neutrality rules would have unintended consequences that could limit the future possibilities of the Internet. The supporters of government regulation of the Internet would actually cause the problems they claim they want to prevent. As Liquid Culture puts it, “The issue is not, however, entirely without irony…”

The real news from this week’s Business Week isn’t the cover story on Google’s increasing hegemony across the web. It’s the more immediate concern that weak capital spending may upend the economy.

Look at the facts:

• Orders for capital goods fell 1.2 percent in February, the fourth decline in capital spending over the past five months.

• The 4.4 percent growth rate in equipment outlays in 2006 is the smallest increase in three years.

• The subprime loan hemorrhage and spike in the price of oil have hammered investor confidence to its lowest level in six months, according to a UBS survey. This is key because prospects for demand, which have slowed and show no signs of a pick-up, drive capital outlays.

Congress and maybe a few bloggers might want to consider this as they advocate for neutrality regulations. Take the Dorgan-Snowe bill which gives the FCC six months to write rules that will legally bind Internet carriers. Given the inevitable lobbying, litigation and the impact of new technology on static regulation, there’s a greater likelihood of Sanjaya joining the Mormon Tabernacle Choir than this getting done in only six months.

Telecom investment is a bright spot in the otherwise dismal capital spending economy. But a regulatory fiat that interferes with America’s network build-out — like six months of legal limbo — is an economic Russian roulette.

We were surprised to see TechDirt’s over-the-top reaction to one of our posts this week, “Hands Off the Wireless Spectrum.” If our characterization of their position as “reluctant” was wrong, we apologize. But we have nothing to apologize for in terms of our legitimate and substantive role in this important public policy debate.

Our focus is on the nation’s broadband needs and on the facts. Facts are neither honest nor dishonest — they are the facts — and people can reach their own conclusions over what the facts mean in terms of whether we need new laws on net neutrality. We happen to think we don’t need new laws, because the facts we have been pointing out for some time are these:

• There is no problem to solve. Nobody has shown that there have been any meaningful breaches of basic neutrality on the web. Pro-regulation activists have tried to make case studies out of AOL, Cox and a Canadian telecom firm, and none of those bore out. (This may have something to do with why you never hear about those situations anymore). Broadband providers are committed to a robust, uncensored Internet and also aware of the consumer outcry if they provide anything less.

• Nobody has effectively argued that current laws are insufficient to deal with any possible market abuses that could potentially arise in the future.

• More fathers of the Internet, including Dave Farber and Robert Kahn, have come forward to express their reservations about imposing net neutrality laws than have come forward to support such laws. That is because regulation has the real potential of adverse unintended consequences.

• It is probable and even likely that in the not-too-distant-future, worldwide demand for broadband will exceed existing capacity. A massive new build-out to handle that capacity is needed, and net neutrality would effectively require broadband providers to pass the cost of that build-out on to consumers exclusively.

• The Internet has never been “neutral” in the way that net neutrality activists claim. There is no utopia to return to; the Net has always been a mishmash of “best effort delivery” networks and loose agreements. Having smart networks, which net neutrality regulation would prohibit, will help to rationalize and improve the existing situation.

• In Canada, where a similar debate is occurring, their CTC bureaucracy is so mired in red tape they can’t even remove online death threats against human rights attorney Richard Warman.

• Dorgan-Snowe’s first effect would be to freeze the broadband marketplace exactly where it is, disallowing not just theoretical abuses but new innovations, too.

• The United States ranks 16th worldwide in access to broadband Internet.

• Hands Off the Internet has always endorsed the four principles of net neutrality: Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice; Consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement; Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.” We even took out a print ad last year to say so.

TechDirt, maybe we’re not so different. If we agree that the basic ideas of net neutrality are inoffensive but mandating them into law could be a disastrous move, then there’s more to agree on than disagree

As noted previously, there’s a new episode in the Net’s long-running soap opera, “Which Side Of Its Mouth Will Google Talk Out Of Today.”

Most recently, Google is trumpeting the fact that its YouTube subsidiary pumps out 100 million video streams per day.� � That’s almost equal to what techies call a petabyte - 10 to the 15th power - every day.� Yowza!� But then it sends out a senior official to tell the world that the Net isn’t scalable for video.

Actually, if you interpret his comments narrowly, he’s right: An IPTV product can’t really touch the public Internet without losing the level of quality consumers demand.

But the problem with Google’s position here is that conflicts with the company’s position in Washington.� There, Google’s advocating neutrality regulations not only for the public Internet, but also for virtual private networks.� These include the networks that telecom companies are building precisely because the public Internet doesn’t offer enough capacity.

It’s a convenient two-step and it may have something to do with Google’s overall business model, which is based on making a fortune by paying for less of the expensive Internet backbone than it uses.

Incidentally, there’s a wonderfully humorous part in this soap opera too.� That’s when certain bloggers belatedly recognize that Google’s decision to jump into bed with the cable guys is also its first step away from funding the Net neutrality LOBBYING movement (or “funding Net neutrality lobbying efforts”).

Rest assured, this first step won’t be the last.

More thinking in public from big thinker Esther Dyson, on the future of the Internet. This time she took her thoughts to the Huffington Post, which is known as a reliable supporter of the “net neutrality” cause but not known as a bastion of independent thinking. Yet when Ms. Dyson showed up, that’s exactly what they got. She wrote:

[Net neutrality advocates] want to make it illegal for certain (big bad) companies to offer too much in the way of network-based enhancements and charge for them. They are generally suspicious of business and even of consumers making their own choices. It’s unfair, they say, for a movie-streaming service to be able to pay more to offer faster access to consumers - whether they reap profits from ads or charge the consumers directly.

Perhaps the consumers should be able to decide for themselves, but amidst all the rhetoric they have a hard time figuring out what to ask for…. There are real issues here, but legislation isn’t gong to solve them. Antitrust enforcement is probably the best solution.

We agree on this much for certain — there are no current problems with the way our national broadband infrastructure is being used, and even if one was to arise down the road, any issues could be settled using existing antitrust law. If protecting competition and the market was all the “neutrality” backers were really interested in, they would study up on their antitrust law and keep one eye on the market.

Of course that isn’t what they’ve done. Because that was never really their interest. Speaking of which, don’t miss the vitriol in the comment section after her piece… attention, Senators – these are the people who are calling you up and asking you to back net neutrality laws. Does it seem like they’ve given the matter serious thought?

Few bloggers have been more on-point about the misbegotten efforts to regulate the Internet over the past year than Richard “yes, I invented Ethernet” Bennett. We can’t help passing along his stinging rebuke to the “telecom wonks” who don’t think clearly about the consequences of “net neutrality” legislation or don’t understand it:

Just so we’re clear, networks of the past were designed for a single service: the telegraph network only carried telegrams, not phone calls; the telecom network wasn’t designed for television, and the CATV network, in its original form, didn’t carry data or voice. The Internet is a packet data network that fundamentally is capable of serving a variety of needs without much effort…

If we’re going to get regulatory with the Internet, we’re not going very far until we recognize this unique character. It’s not enough to be strict about how users of a single service are treated relative to each other, we have to understand how different services relate to each other. The telecom wonks’ approach is simply to ban “different services” in order to force-fit the Internet into the Procrustean Bed of the traditional regulatory model.

A “neutral” Internet would stifle online innovation by locking out new services that require smart delivery techniques. A “dumb network” (if you’ve heard the term) isn’t just a clever phrase — it’s an accurate description of what a regulated Internet would be like.

A free (liberty, not beer) Internet has served us well and that’s the way to keep going.