Encouraging news yesterday in the net neutrality debate. The Internet Freedom Coalition, a group of free-market conservative organizations, called on House Republicans to reject proposed net neutrality regulations. As Jason Wright, president of the Institute for Liberty points out, “In today’s climate, you don’t often see such agreement among free-market conservatives.”

“Net neutrality would be the first step down the dangerous path of Internet regulation” said Tom Readmond, executive director of Americans for Tax Reform’s Media Freedom Project.

Scott Cleland from NETCompetition joins George Gilder for a podcast discussion. Topics include innovation, net neutrality, and what's next......

To listen, click on the play button below, or download the podcast to take it with you.

Reality: The Internet is a network of private networks enabled by many universally-accepted, consensus standards. No single entity can control or change these standards. Network neutrality is not required to protect today’s Internet.

Essential Internet Standards:

• Internet Transmission Protocol (IP) is universally-accepted and enables all types of communications technologies to fully inter-operate and function as one network;

• Domain Name Systems (DNS) administered by ICANN, an international non-profit corporation, provides a universally-accepted address system for Internet devices; and 

• World Wide Web (www) is a universally-accepted standard that makes text, graphics, sound and animation on HTTP Internet servers accessible to Internet users with a point and a click.

All these private networks have freely and openly accepted these universal Internet standards, because it is in their economic self-interest to do so and in the interests of tier users, not because it is required.

Several bloggers have greeted my recent entry into the net neutrality debate with less than flattering portrayals. Examples include: Digital Destiny, NSP Strategist, and Dana Blankenhorn. The common thread reads that anyone associated with communications companies must be bad, wrong, or have nothing worthy to say. Ouch!

If you are reading this and support net neutrality, I thank you for your open-mindedness. For those of you opposed to my position, I believe net neutrality should be debated on the merits not shaped by personal attacks and false assumptions. Let me explain.

I'll be interested to learn how many eBay users see through the self-serving call to action letter they received yesterday from eBay CEO Meg Whitman. eBay users are very savvy business people, and if they read the letter carefully, they will see that eBay is asking to get a better bandwidth deal for itself than its users get.

If eBay didn't live in the rarified air of 82% gross profit margins and the Internet giant elites, and if eBay truly looked at the world through its earthbound users' eyes, it would see that eBay users have long toiled away in the "two-tiered" Internet world that they look upon with such disdain. eBay should know that its users have long had the competitive choice of using the slow-lane, "dirt road" of dial-up (still used by ~35 million American households), and the faster lanes of different types of broadband (now used by over 37 million American

I spoke about net neutrality this morning on the NPR program On Point. While I had hoped for a more balanced debate, I was able to make a solid argument for letting competition, not government, continue to shape the Internet and encourage online innovation. I was also able to briefly mention how network neutrality legislation is actually corporate welfare for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay and others. Right now, there are a lot of people out there trying to scare people into supporting net neutrality. The fear-mongering about censored content, degraded Internet, etc.

ItsOurNet.org continues the well-established net neutrality pattern of crying “wolf" in hopes of scaring people into running to their rescue on net neutrality. They obviously think people are stupid and won’t remember what they say. Just like the proverbial boy who cried wolf learned the hard way, if people can’t trust that your cries for help are true, they won’t believe you when you do tell the truth. People aren’t stupid and they do remember. The e-commerce giants’ latest crying-wolf, with absolutely no evidence to support it, is shameless: implying that Moms won’t be able to protect their families; e-mail users won’t be able to keep in touch with family and friends, small businesses won’t be able to survive online, and churches won’t be able to get their messages out to congregants.