When I opened the Jan. 27 issue of The Crimson White, the article titled “Open Internet means more innovation” immediately caught my eye. Michael Patrick’s biweekly opinion column offered a flippant vilification of Internet service providers. Patrick declared Barack Obama and the Federal Communications Commission are saviors of the Internet for stepping in to stop tyrannical ISPs from blocking websites and keeping them from offering Internet “fast lanes” to certain companies.

I realize that this issue involves technologies not easily explained, but I implore you to read on. You don’t need to totally grasp the technologies in play to understand the importance of the Internet to us all and to be able to see the profound implications that this government regulation could have on our future.

I will quickly lay out several reasons why net neutrality is simply unacceptable and must be stopped.

First of all, the FCC simply does not have the legal authority to regulate the Internet. In April 2010, a Federal Appeals Court made this clear when they struck down the FCC’s claim that they have jurisdiction over the Internet.

Then, in November 2010, a bill was introduced in Congress that would reclassify the Internet as a telecommunications service, similar to telephone companies, thereby placing it under FCC control. This reclassification was overwhelmingly opposed, even by the then Democrat-controlled Congress.

I suppose we could stop there, but we all know that lack of legal authority never stopped a decent bureaucrat.

So what does the FCC mean when it says that it wants to keep ISP’s from “prioritizing content” and creating Internet “fast lanes”? The capacity of the Internet is not limitless. Only a limited amount of data can flow through at a given time. Advances in technologies are now allowing this data to be analyzed as it’s being sent.

This is great because important data that requires a lot of bandwidth, such as live streaming video, can be prioritized to flow through first while less important data, like spam, is given lower priority. This common sense process can optimize user experience and also opens up the Internet to new technologies that could revolutionize our lives.

For example, if you needed an emergency surgery but couldn’t get to the ideal doctor, new innovations could allow that ideal surgeon to direct the operation from anywhere in the world, through live video streaming, in real-time, over the Internet. This is just one example of the limitless potential of Internet technologies that wouldn’t be possible with net neutrality.

Under this innovation-killing regulation, ISP’s would not be allowed to give your surgery’s transmission the “fast lane” it would need to stream instantly at a high enough quality by giving it priority over far less important Internet activity.

Well, what if Internet Service Providers block websites I like to visit or censor free speech? Protecting consumers can be an important role of government. However, ISP’s want to make money by providing access to the Internet to consumers. If they don’t provide a high quality product, consumers won’t buy it. There just is not a valid motivation for ISP’s to arbitrarily block websites, as the FCC would have us believe, because this would cause them to lose money by consumers cancelling their service.

The idea of net neutrality came from a University of Illinois communications professor named Robert McChesney. In an August 2009 interview with a website called Socialist Project, he said, “The ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.” That description, from the mouth of the man who invented the idea, has nothing to do with protecting consumers. It does, however, have everything to do with the government seizing control of one of the few sectors of our economy that has shown sustained, exponential growth.

Net neutrality is a perfect example of what Ronald Reagan meant when he said, “The government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Do we want the government getting its regulatory fingers on the most powerful medium ever invented or do we want a true “open Internet,” free to grow as it has since its birth, unhindered by pointless government oversight? Net neutrality can be summed up as the government trying to “correct” a problem that doesn’t even exist. They need to stay out of the way and let the most innovative sector of our economy continue to thrive.

Cliff Sims is a senior majoring in political science.