The House is supposed to conduct a floor vote today on Net Neutrality within the passage of telecommunication regulations. Net Neutrality is an important decision facing Congress, bringing even Sergey Birn of Google out to publicly lobby lawmakers for it.

In summation, Net Neutrality is the principle that the internet is to be free and open. But the internet isn’t free, you’d say. Well, that’s not really true, bandwidth isn’t free, and so you are not paying an ISP for the internet really, but instead are paying to as you probably realize for access and bandwidth to surf the free and open internet.

Major websites such as Google, Yahoo, and eBay support maintaining net neutrality and providing for its protection in upcoming telecom legislation. Telco’s like AT&T who insist that “the internet can’t be free”, want to be able to charge website owners to be included on their network. This would mean that Telco’s could force major, minor, any site to pay money in order to be accessible by users on their network. So if you were an AT&T customer for example, AT&T may try to force sites you visit every day, like Google, Yahoo, eBay, the New York Times to pay them a premium so that AT&T users can access these sites. Alternately, the could also charge you to gain access to a higher level of more open internet service.

When AT&T says the internet shouldn’t be free, he’s only half right. I quote the famous explanation of how free software works, it’s not always free like beer, but always free like speech. The internet is to always be free like speech, maintaining that allows us to fully utilize this unique communication system we now have. However, AT&T isn’t trying to collect money for beer being given away, instead they’re trying to make additional profits off of things they don’t even own.

Imagine that you own a small business, on main street, and people want to come in and shop at your store. Of course you pay taxes for your location, you pay rent to your landlord, and you sell your goods for a price. But now imagine that the city wants to add a special tax as well. They say that if you want to let more than so many people in per day, you’ll need to pay more for a special permit to do so. What’s even worse is customers might also have to pay to get access to your store.

The idea that the internet can’t be free is so devoid of reason, it’s insulting. It’s not free, people pay for bandwidth, user fees to the government, and so on and so forth. What these telco’s want is to be able to make money for nothing.