This week's guest at Heritage was FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, ready to give an answer to one of my biggest questions: what's a responsible conservative to do when an oligopoly makes real competition impossible?

"Net neutrality," Commissioner McDowell pointed out, is something of a Rorschach term. (No, not that Rorschach.) Depending on who's using it, and in what context, it can mean anything from nationalizing internet infrastructure to a simple requirement for content neutrality.

McDowell discussed his dissent in the FCC's ruling on the Comcast/BitTorrent affair. His argument was accurate, so far as it goes: peer-to-peer file transfers use a lot of bandwidth, and the FCC's decision requires service providers to treat all content equally. At heart, McDowell said, it's really just a network management issue: "For the first time, unelected bureaucrats are making engineering decisions for the Internet."

It's tempting to fall back on our old friend Let The Market Decide. After all, if Comcast throttles BitTorrent traffic, the BitTorrent folks use a different ISP, Comcast loses market share, and eventually it changes policy. Voila: market signals triumph, seed rates soar, and everyone gets a pony.

But it's not a free market.

Most Americans are confronted with a duopoly (at best) when choosing broadband providers, and the infrastructure is so expensive that it's hard to break into the market. Without meaningful competition, consumers can't push for better service. I can get my high-speed Internet from Comcast, with all its attendant issues, or I can use dial-up.

The FCC made the right decision, ultimately, writing in its press release:

The Commission concluded that Comcast’s network management practices discriminate among applications rather than treating all equally and are inconsistent with the concept of an open and accessible Internet. Indeed, the Commission noted that Comcast has an anticompetitive motive to interfere with customers’ use of peer-to-peer applications.

If the concern is bandwidth usage, that's easily solved. ISPs have begun to charge extra for more bandwidth, and Vint Cerf, grandfather of the Internet, suggests transmission rate caps. This is a fine idea, and would let ISPs prevent bottlenecks without compromising users' data. 

Call it "net regulation" if you want -- I suppose it is, technically -- but mandated content neutrality protects the customer without hurting competition. Although FCC Chair Kevin Martin acted as though the agency had the power to enforce content neutrality, it's not entirely clear that it does. Commissioner McDowell certainly doesn't think so.

Where am I in this mess? All I want is a Congressional clarification that the FCC does have the authority to enforce content neutrality. Give me that and I'll man the anti-regulation barricades with my ideological brethren. I'll even bring the tricolour.

I'm at the second day of the Personal Democracy Forum, and after hearing from Larry Lessig and the Internet for Everyone initiative, I can't stop thinking about history. The Internet has changed everything, as the hoary old saying goes, but it's changed it back.

Today's America is larger than the Founders could have imagined. in some ways, we're far more diverse, but mass communication has given us a sort of national culture beyond the regionalism of Jefferson or Adams. The national papers and cable news mean we're all getting our information from the same places, and the national media has followed a centralized, top-down model. It's hard to change the narrative unless you're in the club, it's hard to join the club, and it's harder to keep your independence once you're inside. Yesterday's panelists on semi-pro journalism advocated "citizen journalism" of the Mayhill Fowler model as a remedy, but it's not just a question of the media or of access to information.

At the core, the media matters because communication drives democracy.

When we change the way we communicate, we change our politics. It's slow, of course: TV viewership had been growing for years before the debate that changed the 1960 election. Still, it happens. We see YouTube debates, breaking stories by bloggers, online fundraising -- and it's only growing.

The line between the media and the public is blurring, and so is the line between the ruled and the rulers. Earlier this morning, Larry Lessig spoke about Change Congress, a sterling example of citizens using web infrastructure to put the democratic process back on track.

The Founders' ideal relied on real knowledge of our elected officials. For a representative democracy to work -- for me to give someone my voice and my vote -- I need to trust them. Once that meant I put my neighbor in the state legislature, and he chose our senator, but the bigger we've gotten the harder it is to create that personal connection.

The social infrastructure of the Internet changes all of that. It lets us get involved, and it lets us push our representatives to stand for us and not the special interests. When we can band together, we can make our government depend on us -- and then we can trust them again.

I usually get to go to the Heritage bloggers briefing, and I always enjoy it. Today, though, I learned something shocking: apparently, there are conservatives who aren't in favor of net neutrality.

This just doesn't make any sense. The story of the Internet is the prime example of how markets are supposed to work: anyone can enter, and the best ideas, content, and products win out. If I have a brilliant idea, I'll be wildly successful (Google); if I have a terrible idea, I'll fail miserably (Pets.com).

I can put anything on the Internet, because there are no gatekeepers on content. I still have to find viewers, but if I provide a better product, I'll get them. The only advantage that established companies have is their brand recognition and that doesn't stick around for long. What search engine did you use before Google? Do you even remember?

So why do we need net neutrality legislation? Because this entire paradigm -- all the innovation this delicate balance of market forces can foster -- is now threatened.

When Good ISPs Go Bad: A Cautionary Tale

Say my ISP wants to make an extra buck. MySpace offers them ten million dollars to speed up connections to MySpace and slow down connections to Facebook. Later on, I want to waste some time on the web. MySpace is so much faster than Facebook, so I'm going to do it there instead. Now my decision is based on who paid my ISP more, not the content of the site. This hurts my ability to make choices, and the quality of the goods on the market.

Now my ISP has found this blog post complaining about their relationship with MySpace. They're not pleased, so they decide to prevent their customers from accessing TechRepublican. (Great Firewall of China, anyone?)

A few weeks later, my ISP announces that it's got a fantastic new advance: documents and e-mails will travel much faster than before, at the expense of YouTube videos -- the folks using YouTube are probably just procrastinating. Businesses and grandmothers are happy, but there's a problem. To do this, my ISP has to be able to see what's inside my packets. It's reading my data.

This is all legal.

Opponents of net neutrality say I might be protected from some of these abuses by existing anti-trust laws, though at the Heritage briefing former Clinton aide Mike McCurry wasn't quite sure. Anti-trust law, however, won't make sure that ISPs do what they're supposed to: treat all packets equally.

Mr. McCurry thinks we should develop "smart pipes," as opposed to the "dumb pipes" we have now. (Doesn't he know it's a series of tubes?) The goal is to make sure that important information can travel more quickly. Unfortunately, there's only one way to do this: deep packet inspection. "Smart pipes" only work by inspecting the data that travels through them, and that only works by violating our privacy.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!" net neutrality opponents assure us, and after all, no one would ever dream of using our private information against us. Really, we should just sit back, relax, and let all the innovation be strangled out of the marketplace. Also, I got this really great offer from the Prime Minister of Nigeria. All he needs is my bank information...

Net neutrality legislation isn't regulation for the Internet. It allows for a level playing field that lets the Internet work as a model of free market efficiency. And that's something every conservative can get behind.

I just got off a bloggers' conference call with Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who was discussing the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191/S. 3036). The Senator had an op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal where he summarized the bill:

The Senate is debating a global warming bill that will create the largest expansion of the federal government since FDR's New Deal, complete with a brand new, unelected bureaucracy. The Lieberman-Warner bill (America's Climate Security Act) represents the largest tax increase in U.S. history and the biggest pork bill ever contemplated with trillions of dollars in giveaways. Well-heeled lobbyists are already plotting how to divide up the federal largesse. The handouts offered by the sponsors of this bill come straight from the pockets of families and workers in the form of lost jobs, higher gas, power and heating bills, and more expensive consumer goods.

Various analyses show that Lieberman-Warner would result in higher prices at the gas pump, between 41 cents and $1 per gallon by 2030. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says Lieberman-Warner would effectively raise taxes on Americans by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. The federal Energy Information Administration says the bill would result in a 9.5% drop in manufacturing output and higher energy costs.

The EPA itself admits that, even if the bill worked precisely as planned, it would only reduce global temperatures by less than two degrees Fahrenheit over the course of a century. The price tag for this drop? Over ten trillion dollars by 2050, aimed at businesses and passed on to the consumer. Analysts say that the GDP would drop 7% by 2050.

The better solution, Sen. Inhofe argues,

is an energy policy that emphasizes technology and includes developing nations such as China and India. Tomorrow's energy mix must include more natural gas, wind and geothermal, but it must also include oil, coal and nuclear power, which is the world's largest source of emission-free energy. Developing and expanding domestic energy sources will translate into energy security and ensure stable supplies and well-paying jobs for Americans.

A new poll out today indicated that two thirds of Americans consider energy security a more pressing issue than climate change. With gas reaching $4/gallon, it hardly seems the time for a huge and regressive new tax.

I spent yesterday afternoon with MoveOn volunteers just for you, readers. And now, the promised video:

I'm Nicola Karras, the other David All Group summer intern. I'll be a Yale junior in the fall, and up there our Right-Wing Conspiracy is decidedly not Vast; I'm very excited to be here and to be blogging at TechRepublican.

This afternoon, my video camera and I joined MoveOn.org volunteers outside the Dupont Circle Metro. They were in the middle of their “Bush-McCain Challenge,” asking innocent passers-by to guess whether a random fact described the President, Senator McCain, or both. The point, of course (subtly driven home by the enormous red signs reading BUSH = MCCAIN and featuring a picture of the two men arm-in-arm), was to convince voters that...well, Bush and McCain have a lot in common.

MoveOn is clearly going after the coveted “I Didn’t Realize John McCain Was a Republican” demographic. Most of their points were blindingly obvious: McCain likes guns and privatization, but dislikes abortion. MoveOn also wants you to know that he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at Annapolis, because nothing is more relevant to political leadership than a man's academic performance 50 years ago.

"It seems like this is just going to make the people who already like him like him more, and the people who dislike him like him less," I pointed out to the organizer. "It isn't going to change anyone's mind."

"Well," she said, "yeah." But that isn't the point. Why strive for discourse when you can have political theater?

(That theater coming soon, in the form of a YouTube/Eyeblast video; my faithful computer is still chugging through the footage.)