Yesterday, Rep. Ed Markey held the latest of his series of hearings into the future of the Internet, titled “Digital Future of the United States.” The first one was a mild disappointment, with World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee as the lone guest. The latest hearing was something else altogether, with representatives from YouTube, TiVo, Disney and HDNet — and the subject of “net neutrality” was on everyone’s minds.

The hearing was a big deal in the blogosphere. Because the theme for yesterday’s hearing was “The Future of Video,” Markey held up a digital video camera to capture the first-ever YouTube video taken from the perspective of a House committee chairman:

Things like this are a lot of fun, and another reminder of how far the Internet has come in the past decade. However, the rapid growth of YouTube and other video-sharing services should put us in mind of expanding broadband capacity.

Yesterday, in the video below, Cuban lamented the fight over “net neutrality” issue, which he rightly sees as a distraction from the truly important goal — bringing the United States’s broadband speeds up to the level of our trading partners in Europe and along the Pacific Rim.

As he said yesterday:

This issue goes away completely if bandwidth constraints go away.

Unlike Mr. Cuban, we don’t think that the need for QoS necessarily will go away – guaranteed packet delivery will always have its place – but we agree the “net neutrality” cause could disappear tomorrow and the world would be the better for it, so long as there was much greater broadband capacity and greater competition for providing that broadband for the consumer.

With 100 million views per day and counting, YouTube takes up much more of the limited capacity than AOL chat rooms ever did — and this is especially an issue that Mark Cuban raised over a year ago, in a post at his Blog Maverick site, “Hey Baby Bells & Cable, We need multiple tiers of service.”

And now with TV-like online video services like Joost coming online, it makes even more sense to make last-mile fiber a priority. We’re not at the moment of crisis yet, but considering the ever-growing demands on our nation’s broadband networks, we should be investing now.

That includes making the broadband market more attractive — which also means putting hypothetical worries about “neutrality” aside and building the capacity that will prove it irrelevant.

The latest headache for those pushing so-called neutrality regulation involves “ESPN360”, run by the Disney Corp. According to news reports, Disney is charging Internet providers for the right to carry the ESPN service. If a provider doesn’t pay, then that provider’s subscribers cannot access the service.

Of course the other way to view this is that if a provider does pay, then ALL its subscribers pay higher subscription fees even if they don’t use the ESPN service.

So far, some broadband providers have coughed up the money. Others are holding back, perhaps concerned that other sites might emulate the Disney model thus sending access rates higher.

We’re not sure whether ESPN’s pricing gambit will catch on. Neither is anyone else, which is why it’s received so much attention. But that’s the point. Consumer tastes online are changing rapidly, meaning a few business models will work but most won’t. (Remember how Microsoft was supposed to rule the Internet by bundling MSN with Windows? It had all the charm of a CueCat.)

For government to try to impose pricing regulations on tomorrow’s Internet based on hypothetical fears and conjecture is a springboard to certain failure.