So you have too much to drink and decide you want to be famous on the internet. You go home, take a video of yourself dancing half-naked to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies,” and upload it onto the web. I, or anyone else, would be able to watch that video with the same ease that I could pull up a CNN news clip, or a TV show from Hulu. Why? Net neutrality. A great concept that has once again found itself in the line of fire of telecommunications regulators who want to stifle your drunken escapades by forcing you to pay up, or get offline.

So what is net neutrality? Think of the internet, as former Alaskan senator Ted Stevens once famously declared, as a series of tubes. Right now, every website and user has equal access to those tubes – from the New York Times homepage to your terrible video blog. Any two webpages of comparable size will load at the same rate, regardless of whether a page is owned by Viacom or your grandmother. Net neutrality ensures that everyone is operating on an equal playing field.

So where’s the threat? The Internet Freedom Act of 2009. Introduced by Senator John McCain, who is “aware of the internet,” the ironically titled Internet Freedom Act seeks to block the FCC from internet regulation. As background, the day before the bill was introduced, the FCC voted unanimously to enforce net neutrality. In other words, the FCC wants to regulate the internet by not letting anyone regulate the internet. Suddenly, McCain comes up with the Internet Freedom Act, declaring that net neutrality will ruin the internet and stifle growth. Except net neutrality isn’t new, it’s been the law for online interaction since the internet was born.

With a sudden zeal over something which he has not been known to understand (which is certainly in no way connected to the fact that he receives more money from telecommunications companies than any other lawmaker), McCain seems primarily concerned that the FCC’s enforcement of net neutrality will somehow lead to government regulation of content, or of the speed at which content is obtained. Indeed, it seems like a legitimate concern, except that it is exactly what net neutrality has been always designed to prevent. Without it, Viacom, AT&T and others intend to charge websites for bandwidth usage. In other words, if you pony up the cash, they’ll let people access your websites. To go back to our metaphor, the tubes are only big enough for those who can afford the right to use them.

The reason that the internet is great is that it’s the epitome of free speech. It doesn't matter who you are or where you’re from, your voice has the same chance of being heard as anyone else’s. Most of the great, famous videos you’ve probably watched on the internet aren’t from major corporations or companies, but from someone unknown whose video just happened to go viral. Think of the “Numa Numa” guy, or “Charlie the Unicorn.” They would never have been able to afford the price of access, and we’d be left without their insane antics. I’m as suspicious of government interference as the next guy, but it seems to me that “liberating” the internet from the government only to hand it over to the telecommunications corporations is no kind of freedom at all.