If there’s an award for the dumbest historical reference of the week, it would surely go to The Seattle Times for its editorial in favor of net neutrality, “Free the Internet.” It begins:

Democracy is meaningless without structure. It requires support and infrastructure to become a word capable of giving entire nations voice and freedom.

The architects of America’s democracy knew this. The Founding Fathers made sure newspapers and magazines were widely distributed by allowing periodicals to utilize low postage rates.

Come again? Saying that the Founding Fathers encouraged newspapers by allowing them to “utilize” low postage rates is like saying that the USC Trojans are undefeated because the players are encouraged to wear cleats.

The obvious irony, no doubt lost on The Seattle Times editorial board, is that the Founding Fathers truly protected newspapers by prohibiting Congress from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Yet The Times’ editorial is actually a cri de coeur for a law giving federal regulators and judges the ultimate say over today’s Internet.

The editorial gets even better: “Constructive regulation is needed to allow the Internet to grow and mature.” Really? For more than a decade, the Net has grown rather nicely without a lot of “constructive regulation” so it seems odd that the editorial doesn’t even offer a reason. Here’s a wild guess why: The deafening silence is The Seattle Times’ admission that there is not a single problem facing net users today that could be resolved with net neutrality.

Finally, the comment that “there is nothing stopping” a carrier from “degrading content from competitors” is an eye-roller given all the antitrust and other laws protecting Net users from online discrimination. For more on this, click here [PDF].

On one point, we do agree with The Seattle Times: The Net requires “support and infrastructure.” Our view is that this should be a shared responsibility involving individual and large corporate users. The Times would exempt the corporations through net neutrality and put the costs entirely on Net users.

That’s their right of course, but it seems an odd way to claim that you’re on the side of the little guy.

Thanks to our new friends at Save Teh Internet (read that again closely) for opening our eyes to the real issues surrounding the net neutrality debate.

According to their website, Save Teh Internet serves at the forefront of “the Fight for teh Internet Freedom — Freedom in this case meaning the coercive force of government regulation.”

We highly recommend viewing their “net neutrality” PSA below:

How can you see that and not want to save teh Intarwebs?

Always ones to toot our horns over here at Hands Off the Internet, we thought we’d point up a small bit of praise from one of the many (and growing) number of bloggers skeptical about the whole “net neutrality” gambit:

Thank you for your comment, and thanks for your work with the Hands Off the Internet organization. I really enjoy the HOTI blog, too. Not only do I think the blog makes good points, it’s also a pretty entertaining read.

Thank you, Darren Cauthon. If you’ll keep calling out the meritless arguments on the other side, we’ll keep at it over here — and there’s certainly no shortage of material.

It was only a matter of time. The net neutrality folks now are taking their one size fits all philosophy into new realms and are objecting to the proposal of the United States Postal Service to charge less per item for larger mailers of print media. Here is one blogger’s account :

I knew the price of stamps was going up again. What I didn’t know was that this time, the proposed rate hike was a comprehensive change to periodical rate structure that benefits high-volume periodicals and penalizes small presses. I think it’s fair to describe this as a postal equivalent of “net neutrality”: high volume customers seem to have negotiated preferential rates.

So now, according to the “neutrality” folks, getting a discount per item because you’re buying in bulk is inherently “non-neutral” and hurts the market. Gee, do you think these people will ever shop at Costco again? What’s next on the agenda, a campaign against group sales of show tickets? Outlawing baker’s dozens? Protesting kids stay free?

When you step back and look at it, it’s pretty clear that “net neutrality” is no life and death issue. Otherwise, why confuse it with “postal neutrality,” whatever that’s supposed to be? Because “net neutrality” is just another pet issue – one more generic cause with a one-size-fits-all rallying cry. The only real surprise is that they let the cat out of the bag.

There’s a new working paper from AEI-Brookings Joint Center making the rounds. The title? “Economists’ Statement on Network Neutrality Policy.” The authors are 16 academic economists from the United States, United Kingdom and France, including Robert Litan from AEI-Brookings and Thomas W. Hazlett from George Mason.

But don’t let that scare you: It’s concise, written in plain English, and offers policy proposals that aim to both protect the online experience as we know it today and foster an environment under which the U.S. Internet can flourish. Click here to download it free as a PDF. Here are their key recommendations:

Recommendation 1: The antitrust enforcement agencies should be directed to investigate and, if the evidence warrants, file actions to prevent abuses by Internet service providers with market power that distort competition on the Internet.

Recommendation 2: Firms should be allowed to experiment with different pricing schemes for providing Internet access.

Recommendation 3: Congress and federal regulators should promote policies that increase the opportunities for competition and foster Internet innovation. One such policy would be spectrum liberalization.

The first two points should be familiar enough to regular readers, but the third point is an interesting one that we haven’t really covered here. But the point is much the same: freeing up the wireless spectrum so they can be put to the most efficient use is a good, hands-off way to let the Internet grow.

As they say in their summary, “flexibility is likely to be the best way to insure efficient innovation on the information superhighway.”

It takes some courage to come right out and disagree with the prevailing wisdom that “net neutrality” is the best thing since the two-button mouse, but UC Berkeley professor Larry Downes is one of the brave ones.

Last July he wrote a provocative, yet common-sensical argument against net neutrality legislation for CIO Insight, and he follows up again this month with another worthy essay, published by Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. Let’s quote a bit:

Discriminating may be necessary to optimize network performance - Uses for broadband infrastructure are emerging rapidly, and it isn’t entirely clear that discriminating based on content wouldn’t be the best way to optimize network performance, whether doing so would add to profits or not for the provider. The cable networks already “discriminate” in favor of programming over Internet traffic for subscribers who get both from the cable company, because the programming needs priority. Content providers are worried that if broadband providers aren’t banned from discriminating, they’ll someday (soon, perhaps) extract premiums from content providers to get their stuff delivered, or give competitors that option. But some kinds of content should get higher or lower priority as a matter of optimization, and blanket bans on prioritizing may end up making a mess of traffic overall.

And there’s more:

Maybe the Internet has worked so well because neutrality has been a persistent part of the architecture. Maybe it’s worked so well because there has been minimal government regulation of its design and operation. Maybe both. More of the latter to shore up the former is a dangerous trade-off.

Agreed. And not to be a broken record, but while we have our disagreements with Downes on a few specific policy points, those differences are minor and can be addressed later – after we’ve agreed to keep government regulators’ hands off the Internet.

“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes,” Chico Marx once asked.

We already know that Google perfected the Washington Two-Step: It signs a sweetheart access deal with Sony Ericcson to corner the market on searches in the quickly growing cell phone market, while pushing the Feds to prohibit similar deals in the wired world.

Wonder why? Well, here’s a possible response, courtesy of Stanford’s Larry Lessig from this month’s Gilder-Forbes Telecosm Summit:

“There’s of course an advantage that eBay and Google have because they have very fast caching servers located all over the world. So their ability to serve content is better than their competitors.”

As Orwell might have put it, neutrality regulation would make everyone equal – though eBay and Google would just be more equal than everyone else. To Lessig’s credit, he added that this was “exactly the kind of preference we ought to be encouraging in a competitive market.”

But unfortunately that distinction seems lost on the rest of the pro-regulation crowd. Congress’ neutrality proposals go in precisely the opposite direction, extending rules designed for the simple copper wire onto the fiber optic network. As George Gilder observed in the same debate, such regs support competition “so long as nobody wins or makes any money.”

Indeed, as Gilder later noted, there’s a larger ironic twist. The FCC’s proposed four basic freedoms of the Internet “depend on building out the broadband network. Those freedoms will be denied if the network is not built-out. So the question is, how do you create incentives for building out these vastly expensive fiber and wireless networks all across the country?”

The answer’s clear: The Internet has become a data-rich entertainment medium where freedoms can only be maintained through exponentially growing bandwidth, not regulatory and judicial fiat.

“Many Internet giants like Amazon and Google are backing neutrality, because they don’t want to pay any more for bandwidth, which — to match fast lane rivals — they’ll have to in a non-neutral regime.”

This telling comment comes from a Discovery Institute essay that tech guru George Gilder recently promoted in his weekly communiqué.

As usual, Gilder puts this issue succinctly. The key fallacy underlying the novel idea of putting Internet traffic under federal regulation is that the telecom world is “a natural monopoly.” The claim might have been plausible when Glenn Miller didn’t even need an area code for “Pennsylvania 6-5000”. But with fiber optic and digital cable being rolled out at breakneck speed, a $3 billion roll-out of WiMax about to begin, and 4G wireless systems being finalized, the suggestion of unmet broadband demand is ludicrous.

More ominously, Gilder pegs the legal fall-out from increased federal oversight. He’s obviously not the first person to link neutrality regulation with a slow-down in network deployment. So has the Communications Workers of America. (Attention Dems: Listening?) But Gilder’s been right on the cause-and-effect of misguided regulation before so it’s worth hearing:

“[N]et neutrality” is a concept at once so vague and demanding that its penumbra could be litigated in fifty states and up-and-down the federal court system until all our Internet traffic has to be diverted through Seoul and Beijing merely to avoid lawyer spam. By any name, “net neutrality” means price controls on some of the most complex many-sided markets in all industry…

Thanks for your insights, George. In return, here’s a shameless plug for the ongoing Telecosm 2006 Conference in Tahoe, which wraps up tomorrow.