Obama says what we want to hear:

Would you make it a priority in your first year of office to re-instate Net Neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only appoint FCC commissioners that support open Internet principles like Net Neutrality?"

Obama gave a resounding reply:

"The answer is yes! I am a strong supporter of net neutrality. And in case folks weren't following exactly the question I just want to make sure everybody's clear.

"Right now the speed with which and quality of your downloads or links are the same if you’re going to the CNN or Time Warner website as if you were going to barackobama.com. But what you've been seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and portals through which you're getting information over the Internet should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to different websites and webcasts. So now what you'd have is, potentially, you could you could get much better quality from the Fox News site and you'd be getting rotten service from some mom and pop site. And that, I think, destroys one of the best things about the Internet -- which is that there is this incredible equality there.

"And people, if you've got a good idea and get a great website -- Facebook, MySpace, Google might not have been started if you did not have a level playing field for whoever has the best idea. And I want to maintain that basic principle in how the Internet functions and as president I'm going to make sure that is the principle that my FCC commissioners are applying as we move forward."

The telecoms don't like this, of course, but then why should they? Of course they want to be in the pipeline business and make content producers pay to get material to viewers. Just as in the days when the railroads shipped almost agricultural goods, and set the prices to make it just barely worthwhile to ship on the network, being in control of who gets to market and being able to charge whatever you want for it means you get most of the money involved.

And James Cicconi, Senior Executive Vice President of External and Legislative Affairs for AT&T shows how mendacious the telecoms are:

"There is this notion out there that all bits are created equal," he said. "But not all bits are created equal. Some bits carry porn while others carry critical information like interactive video for heart surgery. Treating all bits the same is a costly and inefficient use of bandwidth."

Say what you will about porn, but in fact, if it wasn't for porn the telecoms wouldn't have half their internet business. Porn is what drove the internet and it is one of the few internet industries that continually makes money. There's no way Cicconi doesn't know this. What he really means is "we want to charge more for porn. They're making too much money by streaming smut on our network, and we want our vig".

The telecoms say they don't want the government telling them how to run their business, but in wanting to choose who gets to send what bits for how much through the internet (which, we may all recall, was invented in government laboratories) they want to tell individual internet businesses, plus all the hobbyists, what should and shouldn't be done on the internet.

That's a sure recipe for strangling innovation and freedom and is the opposite of what the net neutrality does. Net neutrality says "you can't control who does what with the Internet. You can't choose winners and losers." When the government says "you must obey Net Neutrality" it is saying "the Internet doesn't exist for the ISPs, it exists for the country. It's not AT&T's network. AT&T holds it in trust, same as with the phone network. It's a public asset we allow to be managed by private enterprise. In exchange for that private enterprise is expected not abuse their power."

The telecoms want to tell everyone what they can and can't do with the Internet. Obama, standing for net neutrality, wants to make it so that the Internet can be used by everyone as they see fit.