On Monday, a broad coalition of public interest groups and Internet leaders issued a document they called the Declaration of Internet Freedom. Signatories included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, Free Press, the Mozilla Foundation, and dozens of others.

"We stand for a free and open Internet," the statement reads. "We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles." Those principles are:

Expression: Don't censor the Internet.

Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.

Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create, and innovate.

Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users' actions.

Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and devices are used.

If this seems vague, that was by design. "The principles were drafted intentionally to be as high-level as possible," said Josh Levy of Free Press during a Monday conference call. "It's not proposing any specific policies. Instead, it's meant to put a line in the sand about what things should look like."

Levy said he planned to begin organizing local meetups to discuss the principles and make plans to promote them to members of Congress.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt also participated in the call. He emphasized that the principles are designed to be broad enough that people across the political spectrum can embrace them. "This is a very non-partisan effort," he said. Indeed, he pointed out, Internet freedom issues "don't really fall along partisan lines for the most part."

The declaration was spearheaded primarily by liberal groups like Free Press. But it also enjoyed support from conservatives like Republican political strategist Patrick Ruffini and National Review blogger Reihan Salam. The pair encouraged Republicans to oppose legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act.

"It makes sense for conservatives to engage in Internet issues more deeply because this is an area of growth for free market ideals," Ruffini told us in an e-mail. "As people live more and more of their lives in a relatively unregulated online space, we can slowly but subtly begin to shift the balance away from areas of the economy the government can control, to areas it can't."

But not everyone was enthusiastic about the declaration. Indeed, a coalition of right-of-center organizations promoted an alternative declaration that focused on a slightly different set of principles, including "humility" and "the rule of law." The groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, TechFreedom, and the National Taxpayers Union, worried that the original declaration contained an "ambiguity that could pave the way for more government intervention" in the future.

Actions speak louder than words

Truthfully, it's hard to see much disagreement between the two declarations. Both sides agree on the importance of free expression, innovation, and privacy. While they likely disagree about the details of how those ideas should be put in practice, there ought to be plenty of room to focus on areas of consensus like opposing Internet censorship.

The real problem with both declarations is that they're so vague that it's hard to imagine they'll spur changes in public policy. No member of Congress is going to come out against free speech or innovation, any more than they're going to declare their antipathy toward puppies or the American flag. Lobbying members of Congress to agree to abstract principles likely won't prevent Congress from enacting concrete bills that threaten these values.

Achieving actual changes to public policy requires focused political pressure. For example, in January, millions of Internet users worked together to kill two specific pieces of legislation that would lead to Internet censorship. Hence, to have a real effect on public policy, these declarations of principles need to be translated into concrete policy proposals that Internet users can lobby public officials to support.

A good example of this is a new campaign by declaration signer Demand Progress. Titled "the Internet vs. Hollywood," it points out that the seizure powers the government has asserted in the Megaupload case could in the future be turned against more mainstream services Web services like Gmail and Flickr. Demand Progress is filing an amicus brief with the Virginia judge who is hearing the Megaupload case, and has collected more than 50,000 signatures in support of that brief.

Of course fixing that problem will require legislation—specifically, reforming the 2008 PRO-IP Act that authorized the federal government to seize domains, servers, and other property in copyright cases. A specific reform bill might not attract quite as much support as an abstract statement of principles. But it would have a much greater chance of actually enhancing Internet freedom.