Free Press has a problem with paid prioritization, which amounts to paying a toll for riding in a HOV lane. Paid prioritization makes perfect sense. If someone pays UPS to deliver a package from Atlanta to Tallahassee while I go the cheap route and send my package via the U.S. Postal Service, I expect the other guys package to get to Tallahassee first. He paid for that service and for his premium he gets the satisfaction of speed.

Derek Turner of Free Press believes that broadband pipes should be widened by the broadband access provider instead of allowing larger content providers to pay more to shuttle more traffic. I find Mr. Turner’s recommendation that the door be widened incomplete and thus disingenuous. Who is going to pay for the door to be widened? The end user sitting in the room waiting to receive data or the content provider that wants to send the data and be charged an amount equal to a larger provider sending a greater amount of data?

Mr. Turner’s recommendation is that the end user pay for widening the door. Mr. Turner doesn’t want to pay the costs of market entry. Why should I and millions of African American and Latinos who are still trying to cross the digital divide of no access to broadband at home have to pay more?

The reason we are being asked to pay more is that Color of Change, Free Press, and the Open Internet Coalition have such lousy and failing business models that they have to externalize their costs and losses to the “persuadables” in the minority community. That’s the real fakeness of the net neutrality argument.

On 27 July 2010, Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski gave testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation regarding consumer privacy over the nation’s communications networks. Some of the chairman’s verbiage caught my attention.

I found it disturbing that Mr. Genachowski consistently made reference to “Internet communications” throughout his opening testimony. Simply put, there is no such thing as Internet communications. Internet services pursuant to the Communications Act as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 are defined as information services not telecommunications services.

One could argue that voice-over-the-Internet could be labeled as such, but Mr. Genachowski also made reference to VoIP so that led me to conclude that he could and did distinguish VoIP from Internet communications.

What Mr. Genachowski is doing, which is not surprising, is trying to backdoor the Senate into treating broadband Internet access as a Title II service. He refers to the telecommunications subscriber privacy language in section 222 of the Communications Act as an example of protections that should be extended to subscribers of broadband access service.

As the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said in April, the language in the statutes have to expressly extend Title II requirements to broadband access providers. Right now privacy protections are extended only to cable and telecommunications services subscribers and even these protections are limited and differ for telecommunications subscribers and cable service subscribers

If Mr. Genachowski can’t get the Congress to rewrite the Communications Act to get what he wants walking through the front of the bus, he shouldn‘t be allowed to get it sneaking on the back.

Amalia Deloney, a policy director for the Center for Media Justice, made a few comments recently at the Netroots conference regarding arguments made by opponents of net neutrality.

“Primarily what they hear are messages around job loss. Everyone knows that we’re in a severe economic crisis and have been for awhile. It’s really on all of us to use the power of the Netroots to communicate at the grassroots level.” “We need to get more clear on what our message is.”

The “they” Ms. Deloney is referring to is the American public; citizens caught between the crossfire of this open network debate. The very American public that faces 9.5% unemployment. The very American public, who according to Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke, faces a economic recovery that is “unusually uncertain.“

When facing the severe economic crisis you describe, Ms. Deloney, it is the practice of our nation to try to grow ourselves out of it. One way of growing ourselves out of a severe economic crisis is to deploy infrastructure. We build bridges, roads, and highways. We expand air routes, airports, and waterways. We deploy utilities and telecommunications facilities.

The private sector, as the primary economic driver and job creator in our country, is relied on to do this. It takes money, time, and other resources to make these capital expenditures work. Some of the money comes from internal funds generated by revenues. The fewer the expenses incurred in generating revenue, the greater the amount of profit that can be reinvested into hiring workers, improving plant, researching and developing better services that can hopefully be provided at lower costs.

We call this growth and innovation. This is the type of activity necessary for ensuring that the digital divide in facilities and services is closed. Yet, Ms. Deloney and Color of Change’s James Rucker brush this off as just another “primary argument.” On the contrary, in the end, it’s the only legitimate argument.

It’s time for Color of Change, the Center for Media Justice, and other net neutrality proponents to stop hiding behind the skirt of civil rights while insulting the very organizations with a strong history of giving sweat and at times blood for the cause of civil rights. Maintaining civil rights means ensuring that a strong economic foundation is in place. Net neutrality has not been shown to create jobs much less reduce consumer prices. As a basis for ensuring the civil and economic rights of Americans, net neutrality is a bankrupt philosophy.

At times I want to join blogger Damion White in laughing at the position that Color of Change, Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the Open Internet Coalition take in regards to net neutrality. The leaders of these groups must be big fans of Tom Cruise’s Minority Report. In that movie, they arrested you on the probability that you were going to commit a crime in the future. The net neutrality bunch forget that at the end of the movie, the project was shut down because of the damage precognition brought about.

Mr. White raises the same point and to great effect. Why introduce burdensome regulations to stifle private ownership and investment on the hunch that a broadband provider might do something bad in the future? It makes no sense.

In a letter dated 18 July 2010, a number of civil rights and civic organizations, including 100 Black Men of America, Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and the Japanese American Citizens League, wrote the chairmen and ranking members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.  In the letter, they raised concerns about the Federal Communications Commission’s attempts to establish rules for regulating the network management practices of broadband providers.

The last paragraph of the letter summed up an important argument in the debate over the open network. Net neutrality is anti job growth and anti infrastructure growth. Any economist worth his or her salt will tell you that at the heart of simulative policy for economic growth is a plan to build infrastructure. Broadband providers such as AT&T and Verizon have been intensely deploying broadband facilities for the last five years.

These efforts have not only brought the Internet into homes and schools across the country, they have pumped tens of billions of dollars annually into our national economy. Along with the deployment and spending have come thousands of technical, administrative, and managerial jobs, jobs our country desperately needs.

Should a net neutrality regime be forced on these companies, the new regulatory costs will add expenses and costs that can change business models such that employment may be curtailed. The question is, does the FCC really think it can afford to look like an agency that, on the one hand, touts robust economic development, while on the other hand, it destroys the jobs that exits as a result of broadband providers?

The FCC needs to get its head out of the anti business sands that have been blowing from Capitol Hill and the White House. Broadband providers are in a position to meet an important information services need while hiring labor to do it.

These congressional committees are dubbed “commerce” committees. If they really care about economic growth, they will write legislation once and for all that sends a clear message of hands off of any and all Internet access services.