The real enemies of the net are not just yearnings for control on the part of BigNetworks, but also smug, squelching, and self-satisfied attitudes on both sides of the divide.

If you talk to an engineer and say "I'm worried about the regulatory trend in Washington," he'll say, "Where?  We'll just route around whatever they do.  They're irrelevant.  We've got some slick new open source telephony things coming out.  They'll never be able to stop us."  And that's the end of the conversation.

If you talk to a regulatory maximalist and say "I'm worried about cutting ourselves off from the development of new kinds of interactions and services that will be very useful to mankind," he'll say, "What?  The internet isn't working very well.  We've got spam and spyware and terrorists -- right and left.  It clearly has to be fixed for your safety. Why should the internet be any different from any other form of communications?"  And that's the end of the conversation.

Neither side is considering the amplifying, complex, non-linear events that follow from either too much randomness or too much rigidity.  From the regulatory maximalist point of view, we've got a completely random situation that requires amelioration; from the free-to-be technician's point of view, rigidity is simply impossible.  Neither side is right. 

The smugness is striking.  We need to inject some humility and some hard facts into the discussion (to the extent there is a discusssion -- which is another problem).  We need to solve the problems of law enforcement and emergency services and funding universal service without crippling the open internet.  This takes work.

There is a middle ground.  It's not (quite) impossible to imagine a better way forward.

In the Television Without Frontiers setting, Yahoo! filed some very thoughtful comments.  They noted that taking broadcast regulations from a 1980s context (characterized by spectrum scarcity and absence of user control) and applying them wholesale to internet audiovisual content would make no sense.  Broadcast TV is not the same as IP TV, and even IP TV will take on myriad forms in the coming years:

[I]n a very short time, IP TV will bear no resemblance to today’s broadcast world. . . . It will be a world of on-demand, streamed, live, pre-recorded and citizen-created services mixed into a melange of interactive information, education and entertainment. At the centre will be the consumer (not the broadcaster),  controlling his/her choice of content, the timing, format and so on, and also having the ability to restrict access to certain content for themselves and other family members. Already, Internet users have access to a host of filtering, parental control and other tools enabling them to decide what is appropriate viewing for them and their families. It is not unreasonable to expect similar market-driven solutions to be provided for IP TV.

That's not smug.  That's reasonable and forward-looking.  We need to get many more filings like Yahoo!'s in front of policymakers around the world.