The Wall Street Journal reported last Saturday about President Obama’s discomfort with the Stop Online Piracy Act. Seems even if it passes Congress, Mr. Obama will veto it.

Is the Obama Administration saying it’s more concerned about protecting content delivered by rogue web sites? If what is currently on the books was effective against infringement on American copyrights, would this legislation have been brought forward? What alternative legislation has the Obama Administration offered?

Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, Inc., recently referred to HR 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act of 2011, as censorship.

Censorship? Really?

What we have here is an aggregator like Google running scared because of threats to its advertisment revenue. So what if content providers have to sustain an increasingly aggressive attack on their intellectual property. Compound the attacks with the expense of having to defend against a culprit sitting overseas and you can see why Internet piracy is disturbing.

Other critics of SOPA such as Joshua Kopstein are claiming that SOPA will negatively impact the free flow of information and harm the Internet as we know it. Sniff, sniff. I can smell a net neutrality proponent here.

In an evolving economy like ours where citizens are using the Internet as a resource for generating income, the last thing we need is less protection of intellectual property. If we follow the anti-SOPA line of thought, there eventually won’t be any information of worth moving across the Internet.

What the U.S. Senate failed to consider last Thursday in its rejection of a repeal of net neutrality rules is the potential loss in consumer surplus that broadband subscribers may face.

The additional compliance, regulatory, and legal costs that broadband access providers may face will more than likely be passed on to subscribers in higher prices. These price increases will eat in to consumer surplus.

Consumer surplus is the difference between the value the consumer places on their broadband access service and the actual dollar amount that they pay. If I value my services at $200 a month, but I only pay $79.95, I have $120.05 of consumer surplus.

Start adding all those additional net neutrality costs, and my consumer surplus starts to shrink.

It’s not like the price increase was the result of a tax, where the decrease in consumer surplus could be offset by refunding tax payers the following year. Proponents of net neutrality might, fool heartedly, argue that the benefits of net neutrality do accrue to consumers. I don’t think consumers are following this debate and won’t have an “aha” moment because someone had a question answered about management practices toward throttling.

So with no offsetting rebates or measurable benefits, consumers will experience deadweight loss. In other words, while producer surplus inadvertently increases by some amount less the new expenses, and Free Press goes home at night feeling satisfied about another onerous rule, consumers are left holding the bag filled with increased pricing and no additional benefits.

Should opponents to net neutrality argue this point in court?

The Senate failed to pass Senate Joint Resolution 6 today which would have led to overturning net neutrality rules issued by the Federal Communications Commission last December. It was a good political move by Senate Democrats to vote against the resolution. That’s all it really was.

Think about it. By voting against the resolution, the Democrats get to keep their street cred with the Occupy Wall Street-type left wingers that support regulating everything beyond time, place, and manner for a broadband access provider. They can say to Public Knowledge and Free Press, “See. We’re part of that 99%.”

The Democrats are probably betting on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to go and slap a sense of reality on the FCC and the Free Press posse. The court will repeat its earlier finding: that Congress has not given explicit authority to the FCC to promulgate these rules or redefine broadband access.

The FCC will be forced to ask Congress to draft rules saying as much, or worse yet, go all out and ask Congress to equate by statute broadband service and telecommunications services. It will be the only way that the FCC will get the authority to place even mo0re onerous regulation on broadband access.

Does the FCC want to do this during an election year? They’d have an easier time showing that Herman Cain didn’t harass any of his accusers.

One of my favorite telecommunications industry analyst, Scott Cleland, hits it out the park with his piece on net neutrality. On the eve of the U.S. Senate debate on whether the Federal Communications Commission’s rules on net neutrality should be repealed, Mr. Cleland lays out a clear, cogent argument for why these rules are a farce and should be repealed. Click here for the article.

I would add that while the FCC will argue from now until hell freezes over that they are not regulating the Internet, from a consumer perspective, the Internet is broadband access, and as far as the consumer is concerned, when you start talking about transparency of carrier operations surrounding broadband, that is the Internet. The consumer does not distinguish between the two.

The courts made it clear in Comcast v. FCC not to come back with this back door way of trying to extend jurisdiction thus regulation over broadband. The Congress views broadband access as the Internet and has made clear its intent not to have broadband access treated like a telecommunications service.

All the FCC’s net neutrality rules have done is potentially slow down investment in the deployment of broadband facilities. All the FCC’s net neutrality rules have done is threaten broadband deployment to unserved urban, insular, and rural communities by making carriers think twice about facing unnecessary and onerous costs of compliance with rules invented to address a problem that doesn’t exist.

How these rules aided in promoting our economy is beyond me. How these rules aided in ensuring that minorities get access to a necessary resource in the knowledge economy is beyond me. It’s like the Occupy Wall Street types took over the FCC for a brief moment, and now the U.S. Senate is in a position to evict their butts out of the park.