Bruce Mehlman, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance, shared some insightful thoughts yesterday prior to a discussion on Capitol Hill about the future of broadband and the Internet:

“Pro-Internet policy successes came when government removed barriers, rather than adding new ones,” said IIA Co-Chairman Bruce Mehlman. “Unfortunately those days may be ending. While there is rare bipartisan agreement that the biggest challenge to broadband-enabled growth is lack of private investment and available spectrum, there is growing disagreement on how to fix it.”

I remember 1992 vividly (which means I’m getting old if I can remember anything from 20 years ago vividly). Local telephone companies were facing competition, serious competition, for the first time. There were up to 400 long distance companies in Florida, though most were resellers. Cable companies, who were providing ILEC by-pass services, were testing technology that would allow them to challenge the local phone companies. Regulators were asking BellSouth what the hold-up was in introducing …hold your breath … here it comes …ISDN! The calls for deregulation were growing. Everyone wanted to see truly robust, innovative, and fierce competition in the telecom and advanced services markets.

Yes, there was a time that regulators backed off, and that tactic worked. You didn’t have grass roots organizations hankering to know every minute detail of how a cable company, ALEC, or ILEC ran its business. They were truly consumer oriented, concerned not only about rates, but about the delivery of services to the underserved. Even they wanted to bet on innovation delivering services.

Not today, as Mr. Mehlman correctly surmises. Today with have innovation-hindering net neutrality rules. We have grass roots organizations like Public Knowledge and Free Press actually criticizing minority groups for supporting efficiency of service delivery. These groups have prodded and cajoled the current FCC into an apparent preference for a command and control regulatory scheme. While the FCC talks “robustness” and “innovation”, its actions, supported by grass roots groups that put its consumer ancestors to shame, speak another narrative; a narrative that says that markets are inherently no good.

Bubba and 1992. Along with my slimmer figure, we miss you.

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation today held a hearing on the emerging online market. Senator John “Jay” Rockefeller (D-WV) and chairman of the Committee wanted to know how the emerging online video market would impact quality and affordability of online video content. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) wanted to see, of course, less regulation in the marketplace so that innovation could thrive.

I was not surprised to see net neutrality raise its ugly head. Barry Diller, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IAC raised the issue most prominently as he expressed concern that gatekeepers may try to negatively impact the flow of video between platforms like his or Amazon and the consumer.

I know. Same old arguments we’ve been hearing since Genesis.

What I found interesting was that Mr. Diller also wanted to see light touch regulation when asked about the appropriate regulatory framework for the online video marketplace. He also said that if someone wanted to start their own broadcast network online, no one could stop them simply because of the Internet’s openness.

It’s not like consumers need help getting to the Internet. They have a number of wired and wireless broadband options. There is still the issue of broadband networks being built out to rural and insular communities. The Federal Communications Commission’s modification of the universal service fund is designed to help in that area.

The biggest challenge may be network capacity, specifically spectrum. It’s for this reason why I believe net neutrality proponents will find themselves in a conundrum. They want consumers to have access to all platforms vying for consumer protection, but take issue with two free market methods for obtaining or conserving access to the electromagnetic airwaves: mergers and data caps. The net neutrality types can’t have it both ways.

If Mr. Rockefeller wants consumers to experience affordable access to online video, he and his net neutrality minions will have to accept tier pricing based on data caps. If not, all the “anybody show up and chow down” demand by content providers as well as consumers will result in poor quality of service. Access to the airwaves is finite. Just because it’s invisible doesn’t mean there is a lot of it.

I saw some of an interesting piece on shoplifting last night on CNBC. The reporter made the point that Americans, when unknowingly buying stolen razor blades at their local five and dime, don’t care about where the product comes from. They care about the price.

Wal-Mart acknowledges this type of consumer perspective when it provides head-to-head price comparisons with local and regional grocery stores. In these economic times, family budgets take a higher priority to whether the grocery store went to the most exotic island to find bananas and cocoa beans.

Consumers also feel the same way about their internet service providers and their broadband service.

In a speech delivered yesterday at the Federal Communications Bar Association spring luncheon, Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn said that,

“The FCC set forth basic rules of the road, so that consumers can have unfettered access to the lawful content, applications, and services offered over the Internet, in addition to the information they need to understand how their ISPs manage their networks.”

Access to lawful content, applications, and services I can roll with. Understanding how ISPs manage their networks? I don’t think so.

Consumers care about output not throughput. Americans have always been output oriented, whether the issue is politics or having a report generated at work by 4:45p. Unless the way a service provider is going to unleash an environmental hazard on my backyard, I don’t care what management techniques the provider uses to manage the process.

It’s disingenuous to say consumers care about this. Either that or the FCC is totally out of touch and more focused on appeasing the small group of activists who believe that Kafka the Bogeyman lurks around every corner and do a Tebow in front of a Don Quixote poster.

I prefer to say that they are out of touch.

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.