While I have weighed in already on the importance of Net neutrality for publishers, a few recent items are worth reviewing for the state of the debate. CNET News offers an interview with U.S. Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps, in which he speaks out strongly in favor of neutrality and urges technology companies to weigh in on the issue through their lobbying channels. By contrast an op/ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle from the Heartland Institute, a purveyor of opinion with a particular outlook, argues that net neutrality actually favors providers such as Microsoft and Google with huge server farms to manage capacity.

It's unfortunate that the Heartland Institute piece has received such prominent billing: it is pure bunk. Every publisher on the Web today pays for bandwidth that connects to the Internet, as does every user. An individual with a small Web site on a server farm pays more for more bandwidth, just as larger providers may pay for dedicated communications bandwidth. Users can order levels of overall bandwidth, as can businesses and other institutions, and not be bothered with how it's managed internal to the Internet itself. The fee structure to manage high-demand services is already in place and is carried proportionately already by those services that want more throughput and by consumers who want more throughput on a non-prejudicial basis.

Consumers both personal and corporate are beginning to become aware of this issue and hopefully will begin to weigh in as well. A great education piece can be found at Amanda Congdon's Rocketboom, in which she points out with good humor the impact of cable TV-like packaging that may fall out of non-neutral approaches: "I've got [the] Bronze [Web package], but boy, do I wish I could get Silver. Then I could get - Google!" In the current U.S. political environment anything is possible, so it's worth considering carefully just how these scenarios may play out.

Further throttles and controls on Web content distribution based on arbitrary fee schedules are absolutely unnecessary and an impediment to the effective growth of online content ecommerce. Should non-neutral connectivity become a legal reality, it would penalize the U.S. economy while favoring nations that have much to gain from a more neutral approach. Hopefully non-media corporations weigh in on this as well, for without neutrality they would be set up for distribution fees on top of communications fees for them to develop their increasingly direct and sophisticated communications with their marketplaces. Should GM pay extra fees to up the multimedia capabilities of their online marketing and weblogs? I don't think that they'd be too interested, hopefully.

The Web is a different animal, no doubt, one which has evolved quickly enough that the potential for new ways to market goods and services is already evident - ways that can only benefit from a level playing field that eliminates unnecessary intrusion by players that have little additional value to add to publishers, enterprises or consumers. There's much for publishers and marketers to gain by keeping the Internet a neutral stage. The time to speak up is now.