You might see ads running on blog websites about "whether we want a dum pipe or a smart network." It's a good question. It's in fact a question of immense importance, because the internet is doing for the American economy what roads did for almost 80 years - unlock economic activity and bring it to the market.

So the question is, do we want the interstate highway system? Or an Enron Internet?

Net neutrality is the same principle that we use to run the road system - everyone has access. Even hard core libertarians recognize that rights of way must be public - for the simple reason that if they are not, those who own them can charge any figure that they care to name in order to allow you to get out of your house in the morning. This is so obvious to us now that we forget that it was not always so.

For much of America's history interior movement was by water way, and investment in canals and waterways was the centerpiece of development in the early 19th century. It is no exageration to say that the Erie Canal was central to New York City becoming the important city on the East Coast - because it provided a channel to the inland empire of America, while Philadelphia really only had access into the mountains of its own state, which while resource rich, could not compare with the whole of the country. Meanwhile the Mississippi made New Orleans a major port.

A fundamental turning point in this drive for water transportation was the election of 1828. John Quincy Adams had come to power in 1824, having not achieved a majority of the electoral college, only by making a deal with Clay. Clay, a power in congress, backed what he called "The American System" - a series of canals and investments designed to allow farmers to get their goods to market. It required a central investment system, particularly the Bank of the United States, as the means to both finance the construction of canals, and to stabilize a silver based currency in an open trading environment.

The water based economy provided both transport - and power. Mills cropped up where ever there was head to exploit, and developments in mills included the early turbine. The north east of America is scattered with towns that were the creation of hydropower, many languishing because it is no longer the sine a qua non of economic expansion.

In 1828, this policy era was brought to an abrupt halt by the victory of Andrew Jackson. While Jacksonian democracy is a pinnacle of the early 19th century's political progress, his contributions to civil rights and economic policy are far more equivocal - the conquest of the Cherokee Nation, accomplished by subterfuge, and the protection of slave holders are examples of the first. The destruction of the stabilizing forces in the silver based monetary system of the time was the second.

Out of the chaotic era of free banking that he initiated, came the rise of a pair of new technologies, both driven by government investment, but the results of nearly a century of science and technology. The first was the telegraph, the second was the railroad. While the Watt steam engine had been in existence since the mid 18th century, and Franklin's early experiments with electricity showed that high speed communications by wire was possible in theory - the development of metallurgy that allowed both heavy vehicles, and the bridges they ran over, to be built allowed transportation to be driven by the power of external combustion and steam. In fact, there are developments in external combution from this era which we have still not mastered.

The age of coal, combined with free banking, began the rise of what we would now call "robber barons", backed by government investment, protected by a high tariff, and beholden to no one. They demanded, and got in the wake of the civil war, a hard money economy. The irony beging that they had risen in the era of silver money and free banking to acquire rights of way and loan money, and have it repaid back in a much higher quality form. From 1840 through 1860, almost 30,000 miles of track were laid in the US.

But it was Lincoln who laid the cornerstones for an intergrated rail network - both in the National Banking system, which created a network of banks tied to the Federal Government, and in the Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864. The linkage between banks and railroads grew rapidly - both as a means to finance railroad construction, and a means of enriching both politicians and other important people in the process. By 1872, the first major bank-railroad scandal, Credit Moblier, would occur, and this incestuous relationship between money and rail would be a feature through the first decade of the 20th century.

Through the 1870's and 1880's a series of supreme court cases buttressed the new kind of corporate organization that the national banks and national railroad system represented. Corporations became "persons" in the eyes of the law, and states were sharply restricted from taxing or otherwise interfering with the federal policy of creating an east-west rail network.

We are still living with the form of this development today. The south, focused on external trade of agricultural goods, did not develop an industrialized factory system. Seeking open waterways, fewer rivers were dammed for power, and ideologically opposed to protectionist tariffs, rebelled when they began losing the protectionism war. It is important to remember that before the Democratic Party was a liberal party, or even an anti-slavery one, it was a free trade party.

The result is that the south did not develop a rail network, and this lack of north south right of way can still be seen in places today.

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By the 1880's the US had a rail network, and the railroad companies were on their way to being among the most hated institutions in America. The demand for gold based money which could be used in international trade for manufactured goods - America being the China of its day - and the control of the prices paid for agricultural goods that railroads had - afterall, if you did not sell to them, there was no other way to get produce to market except to walk it - would eventually be the basis for Frank Baum's "Wicked Witch of the West" - that is San Francisco's banks and railroads - and the "Wicked Witch of the East" - that is New York City's. While the movie had ruby slippers, the Populist Party, the Silver Republicans and the silver wing of the Democratic Party all called for "the people's metal" of silver to be the basis of currency. To this day Bryan's thundering denunciation of "a cross of gold" is remembered. He also lost three Presidential runs, a record for any major party candidate.

Inflationary money however, did nothing when it was passed to deal with the basic problem of rights of way. While the populists of that day and age were all in favor of easy money, they had no easy way to make production work. And hence stayed out of power, even when members of the dominant political coalition. It was a gold standard Democrat, Grover Cleveland, who began a shift from railroad driven transportation, to something else.

This something else was roadways. At the time road travel meant horse and carriage - not internal combustion. Even cities were dominated by horse and trolley, and trolleys were still horse drawn. Electrical and mechanical cable systems were just being introduced. Cleveland's plan was to get localities to pay for roadways, by offering an incentive: free rural delivery, rather than having to come to the post office to pick up mail, if a locality created roads to standards set by the federal government.

It was the first building block of a series of road construction initiatives - from the "Farm to Market Roads", one of which Bush's Waco ranch sits on - through the US highway system for mail, to the Interstate highway system of today.

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The desire to control rights of way then, and the need to open them, is a long running story in American history. There are periods where rights of way are controlled, and with them the financial system being locked down, and there are periods of rights of way being opened. These periods often go hand in hand with communication and financial corruption - controlling the flow of things, ideas and liquidity are the ways by which individuals turn temporary advantage in to a rent.

In our own time it is not an accident that the super-scandals of the late 1990s and early 00s (pronounced "ooze") center around the nexus of wire based movement of energy and information. Adelphia, MCI-WorldCom, AOL-Time Warner and Enron, as well as the fall of AT&T, are examples of how there was a deliberate attempt to deceive the public and create a system where the public would have to pay high tolls to get connection with the rest of the world. The result was the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder equity, and the disruption and distortion of the economy. In no small measure, the collapse of 2000-2002 was a classic corrupt financial panic.

The reason for the present push - complete with hand drawn lettering and other accoutrements of faux-libertarian faux-populism - is that we have reached a critical point for video and the internet. The dialup internet was able to move text - and links. Links are important because they act as a footnoting system. The fast dialup and early broadband system allowed mp3 compressed music files. The music industry is still reeling from the successive drops in revenue. The reason for this is that they are used to a technological shift doing two things: one is upping the capital requirements to play, and the second is allowing them to charge a premium. Music companies live for these transitions, because people have to buy their favorite music on the new format. Music companies love getting to make all their good decisions all over again.

Video, however, is just getting into the area of easy transferability. Video is where the really premium advertisments live. Blogads bring in the pennies, video ads bring in the dollars. This is why this particular moment is one where those who hold the pipes want to lock this down - because they envision a world where you pay as much for a DVD over the wire, as you do for the physical thing. One of my sidelines is selling music - a major wanted to charge me breakage fees on my downloads. What is there to break?

This could have played out as a fight between large producers of content and large carriers of content - there were many such during the robber baron era, where large producers and large transporters battled over the exact division of spoils. In no small part, the high tariff policy of the rober barron age was designed to create an aegis under which such conflicts could play out.

However, the populist element has come into play. There is, at this moment, a huge untapped resevoir of ability and energy in America - in no small part because of the education in our country, and also because of the collapse of the high tech hiring engine for so long, and its slow return. But more importantly there is the collapse of the "security for life" social contract between workers willing to conform to the corporate system and corporations themselves. As the developed core of the economy becomes confining and less profitable, people are seeking the new economic frontiers. The pay out here is variable - sometimes very good, but often very poor.

What this new tribe realizes is that the right of way of the internet into full multi-media, and full insertability of video into the stream which individuals can create - a full mastery by anyone who has access to middle class levels of capital - is a destabilizing force. The telecoms understand part of this, and want to see a return to the comfortable top down direction of content, where people pay handsomely for, for example, access to the world cup on ip video anywhere. They want the same deal to your desktop, that they have to your cellphone.

The difference of course is that a cellphone is a device that has very limited content creation, consumers accept this. The cellphone is a personal device for connection, but not for creation. The telecoms don't like personal creation that can compete with large centralized monetizing entities, because they cannot charge anywhere near as much to the content creators - largely because those creators are poor, and are going to remain poor on the cosmic scale of things. Content creators of the decentralized kind aren't easy to charge based on their usage pattern, the average bittorrent file swapper uses far more bandwidth that a blogger or musician.

The telecoms are fighting then, both content providers such as Microsoft, and the progressive and populist impulse. It is no wonder their appeal is to faux-pop and libertarian "make up your own mind! hands off the internet!" And it is the leadership of the forward left that shows that the era is turning, away from simplistic spleen based notions of freedom, towards a more sophisticated understand that people are made free by the abilty to change their world, and be compensated for the changes that they make.

It is my own belief that this fight marks a coming of age for the new politics, because it is an example not merely of defending a vital interest, but doing so from a vital center of activity, one which does not rely upon views that are fundamentally discordant within themselves.

It is also vital for the nation's economic future. Replacing road usage for commuting is essential for any plan to reduce energy costs, reduce dependence on petroelum, and to allow decentralized, and threfore less expensive, economic development. As with Grover Cleveland, who supported individual road based economics in its infancy as a communication system, the present has the chance to engage in advancing a technological road to prosperity which will expand for a generation or more. Or it can replicate the robber baron system, with its attendant hindering of general economic development and creation of blots of poverty.

More over, it is absurd to make the argument that telecom companies have show unique comptence. On the contrary, they have managed to bring down AT&T and Lucent, Adelphia and MCI. Do we really want them to do to the internet what they did for the stock market, namely crash it? Do we really want companies that managed to spend millions on fraudulent development systems, billions on companies that did not return, and hundreds of billions on buying sprees that eventually capsized into oceans of debt and bankruptcy? Do we really trust the people who managed to, in many high profile cases, destroy 99% of share holder equity becoming the controllers of the equity which the country, as a whole, has built in the internet? Investors ask about managment teams, all this group has managed to do, is make a mess.

So do you want a smart network? Or do you want the telecoms beating you over the head with a pipe? Because trust me, they are more than willing to get medieval on your bank account.