I'm lucky enough to live in an area where broadband competition is rapidly intensifying -- Fairfax County in Northern Virginia (McLean, VA to be exact). In recent years, the incumbent cable operator Cox Communications has beefed-up its network to offer phone service and high-speed broadband in addition to its growing video programming lineup (which how includes plenty of HDTV and VOD offerings). I've been a Cox cable subscriber for many years now and have been very happy with them. In fact, after 7 years with DirecTV prior to that, I've never thought about going back to satellite after switching to cable. (Of course, the superior high-speed broadband option that Cox offers had something to do with that.)

Meanwhile, regional telephone giant Verizon Communications has been aggressively deploying new fiber optic lines throughout many Northern Virginia neighborhoods and other Washington, D.C. metro communities in the hope of competing against Cox and Comcast in the race to deliver the complete "triple play" package (voice, video, data) to consumers. Last year, Verizon sent a team of contractors out to my neighborhood to dig up my front yard, lay new fiber lines and install a new box. And then, for reasons I still can't quite understand, another team came back and dug up my yard again to install more lines and a different box! My wife wasn't real happy about the mess this created (and all the grass that died as a result), but I just kept telling her that one day it would all be worth it.

And that day has arrived.

Earlier this year, Verizon began dispatching door-to-door salespeople to my neighborhood in an attempt to sign up new subscribers for their new "FIOS" (fiber optic-based) service. I felt sorry for the salespeople who knocked on my door because they had no idea I was going to shower them with a litany of technical questions based on my knowledge of communications markets. But they were always very informative and helpful. And they REALLY wanted my business. Unfortunately, however, they had no control over the pesky city and county regulators who were holding up deployment of FIOS service in the area. In particular, Verzion had to fight for the right to offer consumers video programming services in competition with cable.

Luckily for me, they finally got permission in Fairfax County. (Of course, Verizon and other telcos are still fighting for permission to offer video services in countless other communities across America. And federal legislation is pending that would expedite that process through the use of national franchises). After I received confirmation that Verizon would at least be able to offer me everything I already had in my Cox "triple play" bundle, I finally decided to pull the trigger and sign up for a one-month trial of Verizon's FIOS service in my home.

As I've written before, America's increasingly heavy-handed, anti-free speech campaign finance laws threaten to eventually ensnare the entire Internet and our new innovative, bottom-up world of organic "we-dia" (WE-MEDIA). Blogs are already in their crosshairs and lawmakers will be targeting other technologies of freedom in coming years.

Want to know where we might be headed? Look at Singapore. They've got a long history of stifling political speech and now their drawing up a blueprint to quash dissent via alternative digital outlets.

Lee Boon Yang, Minister for Communications, Information and the Arts (and you thought the FCC was bad!) recently said that "Anyone, anywhere can blog anything, anyhow. We have adopted a light touch approach in dealing with the everyday use of the Internet." Well, that sounds encouraging, but then... "However, during the election period when such free-for-all may result in undesirable situations, we cannot take a completely hands-off approach," he said. "We will review our policies on the Internet and new media during the election period bearing in mind the changes taking place."

According to this AFP story, Singapore has already been criticized by human rights groups and opposition parties for placing restrictions on political discussions on the Internet. The rules apparently already ban the use of use of podcasts and videocasts for advertising during elections.

Whether or not this all works remains to be seen. It's one thing to regulate the signals being beamed out from a big broadcast tower. (After all, it's pretty easy to find those towers and their programmers). Internet "broadcasters" are another matter, however, and enforcement will become a nightmare for the regulators as more and more people get online.

But that doesn't mean the regulators won't give it their best shot. And while lawmakers here in the States have given blogs and the Internet a reprieve for now, you'd be fooling yourself to believe that that's the end of the story. Regulation expands. Always and everywhere.

I have an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer today about a new federal effort to regulate MySpace.com and other social networking websites. Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.) and several members of the newly formed congressional "Suburban Caucus" recently introduced H.R. 5319, the "Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA)." It would require schools and libraries that receive federal funding to block minors' access to social-networking sites that allow users to create Web pages or profiles or that offer discussion boards, chat rooms or e-mail service.

If you're interested, the entire editorial is pasted down below...

IPCentral.Info asks about the possible impact of net neutrality rules on utility computing and software-as-service business models.

Speak up there - youth wants to know!

Congressman Sensenbrenner's bill amending the Clayton Act to impose net neutrality obligations is a travesty in many respects. Importantly, it departs from the very important principle that antitrust law apply generally across the economy, and not be applied in special ways with special rules to specific industries. James Gattuso captures the Congressman's confused intellectual defense of his bill quite well.

More important than this, everyone knows that only baseball should receive special treatment under the antitrust laws. Polluting this hallowed principle special antitrust consideration is nearly unforgivable. As payback, someone should amend the bill to repeal the basebal exemption, but only as to Sensenbrenner's home-state Brewers.

I guess we can finally declare victory in the Spanish-American War. That war was funded in part by a telephone excise tax, a tax that has lingered with us for more than a century since that brief conflict. The Bush administration said today it will no longer collect the 3% levy on landline and wireless phones and will offer refunds for the last three years, depriving the US Treasury of billions of dollars in annual revenue but returning to phone users -- which is just about everybody -- hard-earned money that should have been in their pockets to begin with. Federal courts repeatedly have told the IRS and the Administration that the tax was illegal, most recently in the 2nd Circuit.

Nobody likes taxes, but I particularly dislike taxes for which I can see no rational justification. The federal excise tax has to rank near the top of that list. Now the story isn't over here; this is an end to collection, and it is a logical outgrowth of court rulings, but I suspect a new administration could resume collection. We need Congress to formally repeal this tax; many efforts have been made on that front in the past, and occasionally a bill will even make some progress. But Congress to date has found itself incapable of turning off this spigot. I'm not sure what kind of persuasive powers the White House has with Congress right now, but I hope they use some of those powers to push through legislation that will make official what the US Treasury Department is now doing unofficially.

Inevitably, almost all battles about Internet content controls become battles about the effectiveness of Internet filters. That's because, from the start, many have held out hope that private filters can offer families, schools, libraries and others the opportunity to block objectionable content without getting government involved in the ugly business of Net censorship.

But there have always been filtering critics and, ironically, they come from two very different camps. On one hand, we often hear policymakers or pro-regulation activist groups lamenting the fact that filters are UNDER-inclusive, or miss too much objectionable online content. Indeed, rumors are that the Department of Justice is currently engaged in major effort to build a legal case against filters as an effective private blocking tool. If the government was able to successfully make such a case to the courts, it might help them undo a decade's worth of jurisprudence that has been built upon the belief that filters offered a "less-restrictive means" of addressing objectionable content compared to vague, over-broad government content control efforts.

Cutting in the opposite direction, many librarians, free expression groups and others have long criticized filters on the grounds that that they are far too OVER-inclusive. These critics consider filters to be fundamentally flawed because they often block access to sites that contain important information. Early examples included filters that blocked access to breast cancer websites because they contained the word "breast," or others that blocked access to Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey's website because the word "dick" was blocked by the filter. Moreover, the critics of filter over-inclusiveness also point out that, despite their technical nature, filtering technologies are ultimately quite stupid and depend on the subjective values / morality of their creators. For example, if a filter maker decides that websites discussing homosexual issues were offensive to him, then anyone using his software wouldn't be able to access those sites either.

These competing anti-filtering forces are still at war today. Not only is the DOJ trying to build a case against private filters, but new bills are being introduced in Congress and pro-regulatory critics are engaged in new efforts to question the effectiveness of filters. (They either want a government-approved filter or want online intermediaries to rid the Net of all content they find "indecent.") Meanwhile, filters have again come under attack from the folks up at the Free Expression Policy Project (FEPP), which is part of the Brennan Center for Justice. They have just released a revised edition of their "Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report," which mostly criticizes filters for their over-inclusiveness.

Tom Lenard brought an economists' perspective to the House Small Business Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform and Oversight this morning. In testimony on data protection, Tom said Congress would be wise to perform a benefit-cost analysis on any legislative proposals. He also noted how in many ways data security legislation can be more onerous to small businesses due to fixed costs and other factors, but that federal preemption could be helpful. His testimony is here.

Four subcommittee members heard the testimony, a good turnout for a very busy Hill Tuesday. The topicality of the hearing likely was boosted by the news of the VA's loss of millions of veterans' records as a result of a computer being stolen from an employee's home. (As Chairman Akin pointed out, this is a far more common type of breach than a cyberhack but the media coverage often doesn't reflect that).

The members made clear their wariness of onerous legislation, a hallmark of the House Small Business Committee. They're not the central committee in the data security debate, but as full committee chairman Manzullo showed in the patent fee diversion debate, when the committee feels strongly about an issue they can put themselves in a power position.

Tom was one of six witnesses, and each provided a distinct view on what course Congress should take. While there was some consensus on preemption, there were different perspectives on the merits of data protection mandates. The mood of the hearing, though, was set by freshman member Mike Sodrel of Illinois. A truck driver who owned passenger and shipping companies, Sodrel spoke of the dangers of bureaucrats who want sweeping rules to ensure their own job security and budgets. "We don't want to help these people grow their business, if you will," he said of bureaucrats. None of the witnesses seemed to want that.

Proving just how surreal the debate over Net neutrality has become, we now have many people telling us that it is "the Internet's First Amendment" and that federal regulation is needed to "Save the Internet."

Apparently, these folks have convinced themselves that, at least in this instance, government regulation is really no big deal and that it won't threaten the future of the Internet. They want us to believe that the same people who have gave us Bridges to Nowhere and an endless string of unbalanced budgets are somehow now well-suited to manage something as complicated as the Internet and broadband networks. They imagine that lawmakers and bureaucrats will regulate just enough to get the job done and help bring about some sort of idyllic Internet nirvana. Moreover, they apparently believe that policymakers will do all this without expansively regulating other online activities, commerce or speech.

How can smart people make this leap of faith? I really think Net neutrality supporters are caught up in a hopeless illusion about government regulation in this case. It all reminds me of a line from those rock-n'-roll sages Guns N' Roses: "I've worked too hard for my illusions just to throw them all away." (Yes, it's true, I'm a bit of a head-banger at heart. Moreover, I just get tired of quoting Aristotle and Milton Friedman all the time.)

While it's true that I am a skeptic about government regulation in almost every instance, I am still surprised about how many Internet-savvy people are willing to make this major leap of faith and put their trust in government without considering the unintended consequences of Big Government control.

IPCentral.Info reports that a company called KinderStart is suing Google for dropping it from the Google search list and thus giving KinderStart's traffic a 70% haircut.

Go here for more on this newest right -- search engine neutrality.