Courtesy of today’s New York Times, here’s another benefit of the dedicated network link: a cleaner, greener world. As Steve Lohr at The Times writes:

As travel costs rise and airlines cut service, companies large and small are rethinking the face-to-face meeting — and business travel as well. At the same time, the technology has matured to the point where it is often practical, affordable and more productive to move digital bits instead of bodies. [emphasis ours]

To give just one example, Accenture used videoconferencing to avoid 360 airline trips (240 of them international) in May alone.

From a technical perspective, the dedicated links mean seamless video communication without interruption from spam, DoS attacks or other problems from the online Dark Side. An added benefit: Customers of these services are financing the build-out of tomorrow’s networks.

In short, this is precisely the kind of “win-win” development we should expect from a marketplace that’s left free to innovate. Hopefully our friends on the other side would agree.

Richard Bennett takes a look at Save The Internet’s arguments for net neutrality. Apparently, lacking good examples, they’ve decided to make stuff up. He annotates, with corrections…

“In October 2007, the Associated Press busted Comcast for blocking its users’ access to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like BitTorrent and Gnutella. This fraudulent practice is a glaring violation of Net Neutrality.”

Nope. Comcast slows BitTorrent seeding, but doesn’t interfere with BitTorrent downloads. And it doesn’t interfere with Gnutella (a piracy tool) at all. No violation of any law.

“In September 2007, Verizon was caught banning pro-choice text messages. After a New York Times expose, the phone company reversed its policy, claiming it was a glitch.”

Nope. Verizon didn’t block a single text message. There was a 24-hour delay in issuing a shortcode to NARAL; shortcodes enable people to setup the equivalent of an e-mail list of SMS addresses. It had nothing to do with the Internet.

“In August 2007, AT&T censored a live webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just as lead singer Eddie Vedder criticized President Bush.”

This was a concert AT&T streamed from its own web site, not something Pearl Jam did on its own. This is no different from STI censoring comments on its blog, which it does all the time.

“In 2006, Time Warner’s AOL blocked all emails that mentioned http://www.dearaol.com — an advocacy campaign opposing the company’s pay-to-send e-mail scheme.”

This was simply a spam filter run amok. It happens.

“In 2005, Canada’s telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a contentious labor dispute.”

One word: CANADA.

“In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service.”

No, they blocked VoIP, not a “web-based” anything. The FCC fined them for it, and they stopped, proving that existing law is sufficient.

“Shaw, a major Canadian cable, internet, and telephone service company, intentionally downgrades the “quality and reliability” of competing Internet-phone services that their customers might choose — driving customers to their own phone services not through better services, but by rigging the marketplace.”

Nope, Shaw sells (in CANADA) a service that prevents P2P degradation of VoIP. It’s a good service.

We like to point out that Net Neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. For Free Press and Save The Internet, however, Net Neutrality appears to be a solution in search of a manufactured excuse. As Richard Bennett points out, “STI offers only exaggerations, half-truths, and outright lies. Everyone should oppose any campaign built on such a foundation.”

In a little covered court decision last week, Judge James Zagel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois sided with Comcast in a case brought by e360Insight, saying the cable company acted in good faith in trying to block what it deemed was spam from reaching subscribers.

We’re struck by the similarities between the arguments made by the plaintiff (characterized as a “spammer” in the judges ruling) and the folks over at Save the Internet. What with all those nasty words like, “manage,” “block,” and “filter” you’d think Save the Internet would be laying siege to the courthouse…but alas, all is quiet.

This episode has us here at Hands Off wondering, since Save the Internet believes all bits are equal, when will they launch their campaign to defend the “rights” of spammers?

Free Press’ Ben Scott was on C-SPAN last Saturday talking about our favorite subject. Some of what he said was on target – for example, that expanding bandwidth is the best way to protect the open Internet, which we’ve been saying for months.

But throughout the show his key mistake was to keep repeating the idea that tomorrow’s Internet has to be financed by the same rules as today’s Net. With Internet technologies changing at hyperspeed, the idea that federal regulations on content and financing that were designed for a 56KB modem make any sense is, well, quaint.

Specifically, consider his advice to Congress about a national broadband strategy: He claims the “cornerstone” should be net neutrality while “step two” should promote higher broadband speeds and lower costs.

But of course he has this precisely backwards! Net neutrality explicitly shifts costs away from heavy corporate content users and onto consumers. So it makes broadband more expensive, which in turn slows progress in home broadband adoption. What’s so ironic about Scott’s strategy for Congress is that it undercuts his own (correct) observation about protecting consumers through expanding bandwidth.

As Roger Crockett, Business Week’s ace telecom reporter, recently showed, the Digital Divide is finally – finally! – starting to close. Prices have fallen while network deployment has kicked into high gear. By refusing to acknowledge net neutrality’s real-world impact, Scott’s ideas threaten this progress.

And incidentally Ben, your friends at Google don’t agree with your “simple” definition of net neutrality.