Today the Federal Communications Commission’s Chairman, Julius Genachowski, announced in a speech at the Brookings Institution that it will formalize a set of policies that have evolved as a result of precedent established with individual rulings that will amount to the creation and enforcement of net neutrality. While I’m neither a fan of the FCC nor the Obama administration, I’d like to take a moment to praise and thank President Obama, Mr. Genachowski, and the FCC for following through with their commitment to net neutrality.

For those who don’t know, net neutrality is something of a buzzword used to describe a series of policies that ensure internet service providers – like Comcast, Time Warner, ATT, Cox, etc – don’t stop users (that’s you) from reaching content providers (like me, or google, or any other internet service) that they don’t necessarily approve of. The rules would prevent your internet service provider from reducing your speed to a crawl when you try to download something, blocking a web site critical of their company, stopping you from looking at a controversial site, watching movies online instead of the cable TV they provide which competes with it, censoring free speech, or doing anything else which interferes with the free flowing of information and services.

Net neutrality is important because large internet providers (Comcast in particular, but they’ve all toyed with the idea) have, in the past, attempted to block certain content – especially streaming movies (think YouTube and Hulu), peer-to-peer traffic (vital to anyone who’s ever downloaded a game or a service pack update or anything else), and newsgroups (which are basically message boards). This wouldn’t be a very big deal if competition existed, you could simply go to a provider that didn’t block those services, but, as I’ve pointed out before, cable companies and broad band providers are natural monopolies. They don’t operate in the same world of supply and demand that the free market system needs to properly self-regulate.

Ultimately, that means that these providers are gatekeepers. They can, if they so choose, tell you what you’re allowed to see, when you’re allowed to see it, how they want you to see it. Such censorship is chilling on free speech, violates consumer’s rights, and ruinous to businesses that depend on the internet to reach their targets – all without providing any real benefit to the companies that seek to impose it.

Net neutrality ensures that internet service providers stay, well, neutral. The rules will – or should – prevent them from getting involved in censorship. Fights between pirates and record labels, for instance, won’t result in a provider deciding to throttle entire transfer protocols on a given network. Fights over what is and isn’t obscenity won’t mean your discussion board on model trains gets closed down.

The bottom line, even if you don’t understand the technical issues, is that net neutrality is a good thing. It is a good thing for freedom of expression and freedom of information. It is a good thing for businesses that depend on the internet to engage their consumers. It’s a good thing for due process and the law. It’s a good thing for the internet providers because they won’t be asked to step in by those who have a problem with their customers.

So far, net neutrality has failed to make any headway in congress. The last time it was up for a committee vote in the Senate earlier this year, it went 11-11 and died without reaching the floor. The administration’s use of the powers already granted to the FCC and the creation of new guidelines to help ensure net neutrality is a step in the right direction until real legislation can be passed and implemented. Unfortunately, the FCC can only do so much until a real bill is passed. While the FCC has indicated that it would like to do so, these rules probably won’t extend to wireless internet providers used by cell phones or dial-up and DSL providers.

While these regulations don’t solve all of the problems associated with net neutrality, this is definitely a step in the right direction and regardless of all the other things we disagree on, the Obama administration is doing the right thing here.