Free Press’ Tim Karr is at it again trying to paint Net Neutrality as an issue of free speech.  This is ironic given the fact that Free Press poses one of the biggest threats on free speech and that they confuse free speech with free beer.  Karr embeds a video with Sen. Al Franken (D.-Minn.) illustrating how he and many other Net Neutrality advocates sees the Internet.  Franken states:

“How long do you think it will take before the Foxnews web loads 5 times faster than the DailyKos?”

This statement shows the fundamental fallacy of the net neutrality movement because it assumes that the Internet is equal when in fact it never has been and never will be.  (UPDATE - It turns out that DailyKos loads faster than Foxnews)  Based on this fundamentally flawed understanding of the Internet, Net Neutrality proponents envision an egalitarian Internet that delivers “equal service regardless of payment” rather than “equal service for equal payment”.

I don’t know if the Foxnews site loads faster than the DailyKos site, but I do know that both sites load a lot faster than our DigitalSociety.org under equivalent and sufficiently large traffic levels.  Since we don’t get nearly as much traffic, it’s quite possible that DigitalSociety.org loads faster than either Foxnews or DailyKos.  We could have a situation where Foxnews.com has 1000 times more bandwidth/capacity than DigitalSociety but they load much slower because they have 2000 times more user load.  I suspect that this is an unlikely and rare occurrence.

Net Neutrality proponents eventually get around to making the argument that only large corporations would be able to afford being seen on the Internet without Net Neutrality and small organizations and artists would be shut out because they can’t pay.  But Internet server capacity has never been free or flat rate and it never will be yet organizations and artists have more access to be seen than ever before.

I’ve pointed out that the biggest barrier to being seen on the Internet is advertising and not bandwidth costs which are comparably negligible.  It’s also a fact that bandwidth publishing text or broadcasting video is essentially free with services like blogspot.com and youtube.com.  So until we can get beyond these fundamental fallacies, the debate on Net Neutrality will get nowhere.

UPDATE 3:00PM – Richard Bennett posted a very enlightening comment on NNSquad in response to Tim Karr.  Bennett wrote:

“Franken’s remarks stand the First Amendment on its head. The First Amendment protects the citizens from violations of our speech rights by the government, while net neutrality laws are attempts to have the government limit the services and business models of a group of companies. If there is any connection between the First Amendment and net neutrality laws, it goes the other direction. Net neutrality would limit the ability of the citizens to make effective use of broadband networks for voice and video communication. reserving good Quality of Service opportunities to companies who can afford to build or use Content Delivery Networks.”