Free speech has remained a quintessential American ideal, even as our society has moved from the ink quill to the touch screen.

Broadband companies can have great success offering access to the unfettered Internet.

President Obama's FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski, has a reputation in D.C. of being a 'tepid' regulator. From reports of his net neutrality proposal, he's living up to that reputation.

As each year and debate passes, more broadband companies will start to see that their future lies not in restricting an open Internet but in betting on it.

To me, freedom of speech and debate are necessary inputs in solving any of our nation's problems, from homelessness and economic inequality to banking, the environment, and national security. Freedom of speech is what Larry Lessig would call a 'root' issue; working on free speech is striking at a root issue.

Without network neutrality, cable and phone companies could stifle innovation.

Being a 'monopoly' is not illegal, nor is trying to best one's competitors through lower prices, better customer service, greater efficiency, or more rapid innovation.

In the early 1990s, Americans used their home phone lines to connect their desktop computers to the Internet via ISPs like AOL, Earthlink, or Netzero. Back then, the ISPs didn't have cost-effective technology to select particular sites for blocking or privileging.

President Obama is a big supporter of keeping the Internet open. During his presidential campaign, he pledged his support to net neutrality repeatedly.

Charter's merger sales pitch is pretty straightforward: it argues that it has always been too small to bully Internet companies, TV makers, and its own customers, so it has'un-cable' practices they hope to extend.

Political institutions are fair game in political debates in a democracy. Nothing is more fair game, in fact, than political matters of public concern.

Default choices often remain unchanged for no reason other than being the default, either because of this lack of information or humans' status quo bias.

Congress created a safe harbor for defamation in 1996 and for copyright in 1998. Both safe harbors were designed to ensure that the Internet would remain a participatory medium of speech.

Without the ability to criticize unjust laws in powerful symbolic ways, we can't change them. And the point of a democracy is that people should be able to convince other people to change a law.

On the Internet, speed matters. According to research by Microsoft, Google, and others, if a website is even 250 milliseconds slower than a rival, people will visit it less often.

Net neutrality sounds wonky and technical but is actually quite simple. It would keep the Internet as it has always been - cable and phone companies would remain mere gateways to all sites, rather than gatekeepers determining where users can go and what innovators can offer them.

Today, in 2011, I'm giving Secretary Hillary Clinton the nod as the Obama Administration's improbable MVP in the technology realm.

I have tried to help build a framework that recaptures the First Amendment as a principle to empower all Americans, politically and personally, through access to plentiful, diverse communications spaces.

The Internet is one of the most revolutionary technologies the world has ever known. It has given us an entire universe of information in our pockets.

The Internet isn't just itself a revolution - it sometimes starts them, too.

The Open Internet principles were not legal rules adopted by the FCC; they were effectively a press statement posted on the FCC website.

There is just one exception to the FCC's no-throttling rule - if a company can prove that throttling is 'reasonable network management.'

In 2007, when I was a lawyer for the public interest group Free Press, I helped draft the complaint to the FCC against Comcast for secretly blocking BitTorrent and other technologies.

The FCC can't enforce press-statement principles without adopting official rules, and those rules must be based on the legal theory of reclassification.