Two key Senators started the Net Neutrality debate by introducing legislation. But the tactics of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt remain.

The 2007 Net Neutrality season got off to a good start the other day when Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) reintroduced their Net Neutrality legislation from the last congress. Note that for protocol sake, the bill will be known as Dorgan-Snowe, rather than last year's Snowe-Dorgan. Majority party first, you know.

The phone company respones were predictable, with one company saying that legislation would impede the spread of broadband, and another saying that Net Neutrality is more regulation on the Internet.

Net Neutrality is nothing more than bringing back the inability of telephone carriers to to discriminate among the content they carry on their networks. They can't play favorites. It's that simple. AT&T caught on in their merger agreement that the FCC ratified shortly before New Year's when the company took over BellSouth.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who opposed Net Neutrality conditions as part of the merger, did his part to sow confusion in an appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He said the concept of "non-discrimination" wasn't clear because it meant that carriers couldn't charge service providers, like Google, for additional capacity or features. That's not how we read it at Public Knowledge. The plain language of the merger is that AT&T can't favor its traffic over someone else's, and certainly not for a similar service. They can't move Vonage calls to the back of the bit line, while putting AT&T's own voice over Internet calls faster.

It doesn't preclude selling consumers different levels of service. Martin gave the example of a consumer who buys a lower capacity of service but tries to access or download something more suitable to an more expensive, higher-speed version. Telephone companies sell various levels of service to consumers now. It's more expensive and more slow than many around the world, but there are different tiers. That won't change.

So let the games and the hearings and the legislative drafting begin. We'll see soon enough who benefits from Net Neutrality. Here's a hint: everyone benefits, whether they realize it or not.