With each passing week, it seems more and more voices are stepping into the debate about “net neutrality” — and many (perhaps even most) of them are adding new points about why net neutrality legislation would be a big mistake.

Try David Cowan, a venture capitalist and blogger, who recently posted an extremely insightful essay about the claims and realities of the proposed legislation. It’s clear and concise, but even better, it tackles the “FedEx analogy” with important detail that’s worth quoting at length:

The call for net neutrality is superficially appealing, in the same way that it’s easy to oppose free trade in defense of your countrymen’s jobs. But just like regulating imports, regulating ISPs with rules on net neutrality is short-sighted and, in the long term, terrible for both businesses and consumers. It’s politically incorrect to say so, it’s likely to get me flamed, and Google won’t like me for saying it, but it’s true.

Market forces will, as they always have, drive innovation on the internet. ISPs will find ways to accelerate and guarantee delivery with all sorts of interesting new services, and businesses who can deliver more value to their consumers through better internet performance can afford to pay for them. Should Fedex have been prohibited from competing against the Post Office, so that “big corproations” wouldn’t have an advantage over the little guy? Of course not.

Proponents of net neutrality would counter that Fedex doesn’t hurt the performance of old-fashioned mail, while express lanes for packets will necessarily slow down “free packets” pushed to the back of the line. On the contrary: allowing ISPs to profit from delivering express services for special classes of traffic will directly lead to the rapid development of additional internet capacity. There is no limit to the number of lanes one can build on the information highway, unless of course you regulate and cripple the only entities capable of building those lanes.

As we’ve long argued, net neutrality would almost certainly hinder investment in new broadband capacity, while allowing the pipe-owners to innovate will spur more innovation and investment. And Cowan has a great find in the quote he uses to lead his post. We’ll use it to end this one:

“People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.” — Max Eastman

We couldn’t have said that better ourselves.