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.

Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti may be able to conjure something from nothing in the movies, but in real life it’s a bit harder. Not that it’s stopped supporters of Internet regulations from claiming that there will be problems if a “net neutrality” law hasn’t passed.

Luckily, our own Chris Wolf published an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune (that’s the overseas version of the New York Times) last week titled “The illusion of ‘net neutrality.’” Pointing out basic facts of court law, he makes it clear why it would be such a mistake to take them seriously:

[C]ourts regularly are confronted with theoretical conflicts that have not yet occurred and they regularly refrain from meddling. As a matter of prudence, the judicial branch of government will not rule on such cases as they are not “ripe” for review. Claims that rest upon future events that may never occur routinely are thrown out of court.

One reason courts refrain is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to fashion appropriate remedies in the abstract without harming the parties and the public interest.

In policymaking, too, in the absence of a real problem, there is a substantial risk of “solutions” harming the companies making the investment in - and responsible for - the Internet infrastructure, and of harming the public interest in the rapid build-out of the next-generation Internet.

Without knowing what constitutes a bull’s eye, it is difficult if not impossible to aim relief. The courts know this to be the case when they are presented with hypotheticals. In the case of regulated “Net neutrality,” policymakers would be wise to exercise similar restraint. To imagine a new department of Internet regulation is to glimpse the nightmare of unintended consequences.

When you have common sense on your side, you don’t need to be a magician. And unless you can see the future, a wait-and-see approach makes the most sense of all.

How neutral is the Internet right now? As we’ve pointed out on more than one occasion, the answer is: Not very. The Internet is a network of networks and technology tools at the input end of networks can result in a content owner getting priority over others on the Internet. It’s an expensive network of networks at that, funded by private investors and public agencies and requiring yet more investment for upkeep. In short, access may be equal, but the pipes aren’t. Illustrating the point last week, Nick Carr from the IT blog Rough Type, wrote a let’s-be-honest-with-ourselves post directed primarily at supporters of net neutrality:

Net neutrality exists in the abstract, in the realm of protocol. Because the content of any packet of data is invisible to the pipe carrying it, by protocological fiat, every packet is treated the same. If that was all there was to it - if theory and reality were one - then pro-neutrality would mean pro-competition. But it’s not all there is to it. In addition to the abstract realm of protocol, there’s the very real - very physical - realm of infrastructure. Regardless of protocol, superior infrastructure provides superior quality of service - ie, faster, more reliable transmission of data. … If net neutrality becomes law, it would prevent big companies from locking in an advantage at the protocological level - giving certain types of data privileged status - but it would allow big companies to lock in an advantage at the infrastructural level.

His chief examples are not new, either. Akamai is a company that operates servers around the world so the big companies that can afford their services can get their content delivered faster than the smaller companies that can’t afford this. When you consider that one of the main arguments in favor of net neutrality is to keep big companies from overpowering little companies, it’s clear that big companies already have this advantage. And yet new web companies succeed every day.

So what’s the real story behind yesterday’s FCC decision to open a “notice of inquiry” on broadband market practices?

Strip away the usual government-ese and this is pretty obviously a shrewd move by the commission because it calls the bluff of those lobbying for broad new regulations.

Google, Amazon and other pro-regulation companies now face a choice: Cither come up with an actual example of online discrimination or admit that existing laws protecting consumers’ Internet experience are working.

The first option is about as likely as Paris Hilton becoming a rabbi. That leaves the regulation agitators with no alternative but to admit that their rationale for ‘neutrality’ is just a transparent effort to shift build-out costs onto ordinary Net users.

Watch for their upcoming filings to have more twists and contortions than an Upper East Side yoga class.

We’ve talked off and on about the probability that Internet video could lead to a disastrous bandwidth crunch. And we’re not the only ones. Voice over IP requires reliable packet delivery, and the About VoIP blog recently touched on this issue:

The whole net neutrality debate was sparked, from what I interpret, when Internet providers felt they had to apply a tiered price structure for connections based on expected usage. Fact is, if we suddenly had the billion or so current Internet users all using VoIP and/or IPTV simultaneously, the current infrastructure couldn’t handle it. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

Nope, that’s a pretty good estimate — and a lot better than the politically-charged interpretations coming from pro-”neutrality” activists.

We all probably want faster connection speeds, and they’re coming, but will take time to roll out. What could come sooner is a new set of video compression codecs … coupled with high-power graphics cards sporting their very own quad cores or more. If our graphics cards were powerful enough, and we used super-crunched video formats, we might possibly reduce bandwidth requirements down to a point where every Internet user could potentially watch Internet TV simultaneously.

Interesting. Hey, sounds great to us. But as good as quad core is, we should still be building out our broadband infrastructure, especially in fiber-to-the-home. No reason we can’t have both.