We return with the next installment in our Deadly Sins of Net Neutrality series:

“Net Neutrality exempts the huge content providers from contributing to the next generation of the Internet”

So here’s the basic gist: Google, Amazon, eBay and friends have made billions upon billions through the Internet and they want to make billions more by providing you with all sorts of high-tech, high-bandwidth applications. Sounds great.

The catch? They don’t want to help pay for the expanded broadband infrastructure that these new technologies will require.

The good news for them? Net neutrality prevents the pipe owners from offsetting some of the investment costs by charging the big content providers more for massive bandwidth use.

The bad news for you? Guess who is going to be offsetting those expansion costs if net neutrality becomes law.

Before we forget, let us happily note that Portia Krebs from USTA has just launched a blog, appropriately titled NextGenWeb.

Be sure to check out her first post introducing the site, and then another one from her colleague, Bill Deere, about testifying before a House small business committee yesterday, addressing the subject of rural broadband — an important issue we’ve talked about here before.

This is an exciting development. In the fight for the Internet’s future, we can always use another ally — especially one who brings institutional knowledge and technical expertise to the table.

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.”