In what is, I guess, becoming a sort of recurring theme lately, I thought I’d point out perhaps the most potentially dangerous example of an attempt to censor what has until now been the freest medium for speech — the Internet.

Steve Boriss, of our own Washington University in St. Louis, where he is Associate Director of the Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT) and teaches a class called “The Future of News,” writes:

To date, the Internet has remained blissfully free of government regulation. Its backbone rests in the private sector, it requires no licensing for use, and it is seemingly beyond the reach of those who would like government to regulate online behavior such as hate speech, obscenity, and too much control by a few corporations.

So everybody is thrilled that the Internet can deliver historically unprecedented levels of free speech, right?

If that’s true, you would never know it by following the news. In a recent editorial, the NY Times welcomed federal regulation of the Internet under the benign-sounding cause “net neutrality,” warning us that Internet service providers might suppress ideas they do not like.

The NY Times editorial refers to legislation brought up recently in the House that claims to “prohibit Internet service providers” from “discriminating against content” to make more money or suppress ideas they don’t like.

The Times editorial attempts to imply that there is a large-scale effort already underway  by sinister I.S.P. corporations to “manipulate” the Internet by ”favoring” certain ideas. But as the original article notes [emphasis mine]:

The Times ignores the fact that the First Amendment is designed to protect us against suppression of ideas by the government, not the private sector, which has neither the power nor the motive to suppress ideas.

Moreover, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal tells us, “Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem.” It has not been given a chance to surface, much less an opportunity for the marketplace to fix this hypothetical problem.

The fact is that there aren’t any cases of I.S.P. “censorship” over Internet content — after all, what incentive would they have to do so? The Times tries to argue that a certain (very unpopular and unlikely to be implemented) proposal — which theorizes that I.S.P.’s could charge certain websites more for faster connection speeds, while other sites would be forced to load more slowly, is evidence of a “campaign” by Big Internet to manipulate web content to serve their own financial or ideological ends. This is simply foolish: there’s absolutely no evidence that this is happening.

The Times’ preferred solution? It supports legislation that would — of all things — put the FCC in charge of controlling Internet content, giving that regulatory body the ability to “step in quickly to correct any violations.”

An advocacy group, ironically titled “Free Press,” is also pushing for FCC regulation of Internet content in the name of “fairness” — though again, no “favoritism” has yet actually happened, nor is likely to happen, on the part of I.S.P.’s.

The FCC has long regulated television and radio broadcasts, requiring licensing to be able to broadcast. It has increasingly censored television content deemed “offensive” — a practice famously satirized on an episode of the FOX animated comedy show Family Guy.

The Internet currently has no such restrictive limitations on “broadcasting” (anyone can do it) or content (pretty much anything goes).

This attempt to “regulate” the Internet is similar (but perhaps not quite as frightening) as the movement by certain authoritarian governments in the United Nations, begun in 2005, to get the UN to take over control of administration of the Internet, which is currently administered by the U.S. private sector. The proposals and discussion at annual United Nations Internet Governance Forums (IGF) make it pretty clear what sort of changes the UN would enact.

It should be illuminating that Syria and China — infamous for their extreme Internet censorship — have been two of the leading proponents for pressuring the U.S. to give control over domain names, address registration, and other functions to a UN regulatory body that would also include regimes such as Iran, Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia — who routinely imprison bloggers and those who create or visit web sites critical of the government.

Such proposals prodded the Bush administration to firmly announce that the U.S. would not be handing over any administrative control over Internet domains and addresses to anyone else.

Most people in America take the freedom of the Internet for granted. Enjoy it while you can – it may not stay that way for long.