Net neutrality means simply that all like Internet content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the network. The owners of the Internet’s wires cannot discriminate. This is the simple but brilliant "end-to-end" design of the Internet that has made it such a powerful force for economic and social good: All of the intelligence and control is held by producers and users, not the networks that connect them.

The current legislation, backed by companies such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, would allow the firms to create different tiers of online service. They would be able to sell access to the express lane to deep-pocketed corporations and relegate everyone else to the digital equivalent of a winding dirt road. Worse still, these gatekeepers would determine who gets premium treatment and who doesn’t.

Their idea is to stand between the content provider and the consumer, demanding a toll to guarantee quality delivery. It’s what Timothy Wu, an Internet policy expert at Columbia University, calls "the Tony Soprano business model": By extorting protection money from every Web site -- from the smallest blogger to Google -- network owners would earn huge profits. Meanwhile, they could slow or even block the Web sites and services of their competitors or those who refuse to pay up. They’d like Congress to "trust them" to behave.

Without net neutrality, the Internet would start to look like cable TV. A handful of massive companies would control access and distribution of content, deciding what you get to see and how much it costs. Major industries such as health care, finance, retailing and gambling would face huge tariffs for fast, secure Internet use -- all subject to discriminatory and exclusive dealmaking with telephone and cable giants.

We would lose the opportunity to vastly expand access and distribution of independent news and community information through broadband television. More than 60 percent of Web content is created by regular people, not corporations. How will this innovation and production thrive if creators must seek permission from a cartel of network owners?

There are well known externalities associated with the Internet. One positive externality is that the more users there are, the more beneficial it is to be plugged in, and the more profitable it is to write software it is for Net applications. But increasingly, as content like movies, real-time games, and other data-heavy services like remote disease monitoring are made available, some data imposes negative externalities-- traffic congestion, if you will-- that adversely affect the ability of others to use the Net reliably.

Until recently, traffic congestion on the Net was not a problem. There was so much excess capacity in the fiber optic cables and other parts of the complex telecommunications network that additional data heavy traffic delivered from one site did not threaten the reliability of traffic delivered from other sites and routed through the Net. But that blissful world is gone now. The existing networks are rapidly running out of excess capacity. We need new cyber-highways if the brave new world of movies, fast Google searches, and telemedicine-- to take a few examples-- is to become at all viable.

The question, then is: who should pay for these much higher speed networks? Asking all users to pay the same amount, regardless of how much they data they download, hardly seems fair. It would be like asking double wide trailer trucks to pay the same taxes for using our real world highways as you and I who drive our much smaller cars. In fact, state governments tend not to do this: they require trucks to pay taxes based on weight per axle that you and I with our cars (or SUVs) don’t pay.

Why should telecoms companies that want to build the next-generation cyber-highways be treated any differently? Shouldn’t they at least be allowed to charge data heavy sites more than others so that the many of us who don’t download lots of data don’t get socked?

It’s that simple, but the implications are profound. If, instead, telecoms companies are required by law to charge everyone the same amount for the next upgrade, there is a real risk that the charge will be so high that only a few data heavy sites will be able to pay. But because they, in effect, will have been subsidized, there will not be enough revenue collected to pay for the new networks. And they won’t get built. And the brave new world of telemedicine and wondrous economic and personal benefits it could bring-- let alone the benefits of all other kinds of uses for higher speed broadband networks-- will be stillborn.

We all want our broadband and the benefits it can bring. Let’s hope our policy-makers in Washington can resist the siren song of "net neutrality" and keep government out of Internet regulation so that the future that beckons becomes a reality.