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.