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.”

Last year Wired published a must-read article that made the important but inconvenient (for “net neutrality” advocates) point that the supposed neutrality of the Internet is a myth, no more real than the tall tales found at Snopes.com.

Now Forbes has a column from Nick Shulz (among others on the subject) that translates an AEI study about the Internet’s longstanding non-neutrality for non-academics:

Robert Hahn and Robert Litan of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies argue that, contrary to the claims of regulated neutrality proponents, “all bits of information are not treated equally from an economic standpoint.” They argue that “the Internet is not end-to-end now and was never designed to be strictly neutral.”

How can this be? The engineering architects of the Internet drafted the technical rules in informal papers called Requests for Comment.
The early drafters of the Net’s architecture, according to Hahn and Litan, “recognized the need to offer priority to some packets over others.” …

If strict net neutrality is not, in fact, essential to the architecture of the Internet, it undermines the arguments in favor of federal or state net neutrality mandates and suggests the market will do a better job of sorting out the Internet’s future evolution.

Bingo. The abstract of that report, “The Myth of Network Neutrality and What We Should Do About It,” can be found here. Click through to find the whole thing. Even if you’re not a techie or an academic, it isn’t too hard to follow. We just wish the would-be net regulators would give it some thought themselves.