A Pew Internet and American Life poll out this week finds: “By a 53%-41% margin, Americans say they do not believe that the spread of affordable broadband should be a major government priority.” Non-Internet users are less likely than Internet users to say the government should prioritize spreading access to high-speed connections.

The federal government spent $7.2 billion in “stimulus” money on the premise that the federal government is supposed to do this kind of thing. And the Federal Communications Commission’s “National Broadband Plan” is premised on the idea that there is supposed to be a national broadband plan. It isn’t, and there’s not.

Much as I love using the Internet for work, entertainment, and social connection, I recognize that people can live perfectly happy lives without it. The invention and growth of the Internet should always be seen as having opened new avenues for people, not as having created a national communications medium in which participation is required to live a full life. Social engineers, stand down: people will use the Internet if they want it, and they won’t if they don’t.

Last week, I referred obscurely to “folks wanting to install the FCC as the Internet’s regulator,” cautioning that this same Federal Communications Commission is our national censor.

A friendly correspondent points me to an article in Ars Technica about the demand for speech controls coming from the same groups that want the FCC to control the Internet’s infrastructure, groups such as Free Press, the Media Access Project, and Common Cause.

Is there a parry to the charge that this is a demand for censorship? The signatories to the regulatory filing “respectfully request[] that the FCC . . . inquire into the extent and effects of hate speech in media, and explore possible non-regulatory ways to counteract its negative impacts.”

The filing does not contain the words “First Amendment” or “free speech.” It means “non-regulatory” the way a cop eyeballing someone and slapping his palm with a billy club is “non-regulatory.”

The FCC is experienced with “non-regulatory” coercion. Hearings in Congress have explored how the agency uses arm-twisting to get what it wants outside of formal regulatory processes. As law professor Lars Noah testified in 1999:

Arm twisting refers to an agency’s use of threats either to impose a sanction or withhold a benefit in hopes of encouraging nominally voluntary compliance with a request that the agency could not impose directly on a regulated entity. This informal method of regulation often saddles parties with more onerous regulatory burdens than Congress had authorized, accompanied by a diminished opportunity to pursue judicial challenges.

An FCC with the power to regulate Internet access services would use it to control Internet content.  There’s no place for the FCC in monitoring or administering speech controls, nor in controlling our communications infrastructure, the Internet.

Amid charge and countercharge about who is shilling for whom in the debate over Internet regulation, Peter Suderman has the right focus in a short piece on Reason’s Hit & Run blog. The Federal Communications Commission’s Chairman is claiming that he only wants to regulate the Internet’s infrastructure, but one of his colleagues, Commissioner Michael Copps, is non-denying that he wants to censor the Internet.

There may be exceptions, but it’s usually pretty safe to assume that anytime a politician or bureaucrat dodges a question while calling for “a national discussion about” the proposal at hand, what he or she really means is, “I want to indicate that I support this idea without actually going on record as supporting it.”

The FCC does censorship. It’s unfortunate to see willful disregard of this by the folks wanting to install the FCC as the Internet’s regulator.

The New York Times starts its commentary on proposed Internet regulations with a clever ad hominem argument: “The Republican attack on the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to classify broadband Internet access as a telecommunications service sounded a lot like the G.O.P. talking points on health care reform.”

The GOP are being like themselves. Accordingly, Times readers should think their viewpoint is yucky. It’s not the most substantive argument you’ll come across today.

There are good reasons not to encumber the Internet with regulations designed for the telephone system. Here are four: The Internet is not like the telephone system, and the FCC  doesn’t have the institutional ability to manage a changing, competitive system of networks. Extending “universal service” telephone taxes to the Internet will drive down adoption and frustrate universal service goals. The FCC is subject to capture by the very interests from which the Times thinks regulation would “protect.” The Internet’s large cadre of technologists and active consumers will do a better job than the FCC of protecting consumers’ interests. 

But ad hominem is more fun. So let’s ask why the New York Times didn’t disclose that, as a content provider, it has a dog in the fight? Net neutrality regulation would act as a subsidy to content providers like the Times, ultimately paid by consumers as higher prices for Internet access.