Hands Off My Internet, Mark Cuban!Hands Off My Internet, Mark Cuban!

Common Cause has picked up the cudgels for "network neutrality," the idea that the Internet should be an equal-opportunity medium, not for sale to the highest bidder the way Big Telco would like to see it. And I love the way the consumer-advocacy group has gone about it -- with pictures of five telco executives in devil's horns posed against the fires of hell. That's about right. But one of those executives is Mark Cuban, the technology maverick who owns the Dallas Mavericks. Wait, this is a guy I used to respect. Say it ain't so, Mark!I wrote about this issue in the Desktop Pipeline e-mail newsletter a couple of weeks ago. (The piece is reposted online as Editor's Note: Time To Dump Your POTS Stock.) A trio of the telco slimeballs in Common Cause's rogues gallery figured prominently in that piece -- especially Edward Whitacre Jr., CEO of what is now AT&T, William L. Smith, BellSouth's chief technology officer, and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg.

A fourth, David Cohen, Executive VP of Comcast, is a slipperier weasel. He is a the Washington bagman for Comcast, and one of the three biggest cable-industry lobbyists in Washington, according to Cablefax magazine. He hasn't been as well documented: the quote attributed to him by Common Cause actually seems to have come from Brian Dietz, a cable-industry association spokesperson who works for a lobbying group that has Comcast as one of its largest members.

And then there's Mark Cuban. He recently opined in his blog that what the Internet needs is "multiple tiers of service." At least he put himself out there, and he gets beaten up pretty badly by the commenters on his post. Many cite factual errors, but I particularly like a note from "bastion," who writes:

Indeed. The big telco weasels have been careful to talk about "the network" rather than "the Internet" because they know they can't claim to own the Internet. But their goal is clearly to turn the Information Superhighway into a toll road.

Network neutrality needs all the support we can give it. The Common Cause Web site includes a suggested email message for you to send to the telco weasels. It's worth reading:

Other grassroots organizations are working to save network neutrality as well. Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group, says, "If we want to ruin the Internet, we'll turn it into a cable TV system" that carries programming from only those who pay the cable operators for transmission."

David Isenberg sums it up like this: "The battle is bigger than Google versus the telcos. It is about whether Internet access is a freedom, like freedom of the press, or a privilege that may be granted or withheld."

This week's stories about Internet censorship in China remind us that censorship is always censorship, whether it's ideological or economic. Messrs. Whitacre, Smith, Cohen, and Seidenberg would probably object to the idea that they have more in common with the Chinese Communist ruling elite than they do with American citizens, but there it is. They want to abridge our freedom, and I think we should put them on notice that they only way they'll take control of the Internet is to pry it from our cold, dead hands.

How could it be that Mark Cuban, of all people, has changed sides in that fight?