If the FCC doesn’t want the Internet to become a vast wasteland for “Gilligan’s Island” reruns, it had better start working with broadband providers now to reserve bandwidth for the transformative applications of the future.

So said Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban after a debate about whether it is a good idea to migrate cable and satellite television content to the Web. Cuban is a firm no on that score. He wants the Internet to be “a platform for amazing” and said that won’t happen if all of the video content now on TV is hogging Internet bandwidth:

The FCC needs to recognize this and start working with Internet broadband providers to define tunnels, Private Virtual Networks or just plain reserved bandwidth that are saved for future applications. When a transformative application presents itself, there should be an opportunity to define the network to optimize that application.

In the event some form of ubiquitous entertainment comes first, takes over the Net and saturates it, how is the FCC going to solve the bandwidth traffic jam? They won’t ever be able to put the bandwidth genie back in the bottle. Screaming at broadband providers to spend the money won’t work any better than screaming to expand highways helps to alleviate rush-hour traffic.

Cuban closed his essay with a pitch for a rainy-day fund for bandwidth. “The FCC also needs to figure out a way to create a transparent market or exchange that allows competing applications a means of knowing how and when they will have access to bandwidth when, not if, it becomes constrained,” he wrote.

Maybe the agency should throw that idea into the mix of proposals in the national broadband plan released today.