Now out of power, the Republican party is preaching the virtues of bipartisanship. A new letter from 18 Republican senators to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski opens with a line of congratulations but moves quickly to the real business at hand: telling Genachowski that he had better not plan on moving forward with his ambitious net neutrality agenda unless he has bipartisan support.

"Such a major policy shift should be contemplated only with all of the FCC Commissioners involved," says the letter. "To do it with just one party reduces the confidence the public and the Congress has in the proposal."

The two Republican Commissioners on the FCC are patently skeptical of the need for net neutrality, however. When Genachowski unveiled the general principles that would guide his decision making, Commissioners Meredith Baker and Robert McDowell issued a statement of their own in response.

"We do not believe that the Commission should adopt regulations based merely on anecdotes, or in an effort to alleviate the political pressures of the day, if the facts do not clearly demonstrate that a problem needs to be remedied," they wrote. "As we analyze this situation further, we remain hopeful that any future Commission action will create an atmosphere that is conducive to promoting freedom, investment and innovation not only at the edge of the Internet but at its core as well."

This point—don't send in the hook-and-ladder trucks when there's no fire—was echoed in yesterday's Senate letter. "Your promulgating network neutrality rules seems to emanate from a fear that there may be some problems related to openness in 'the future.' Of the only two Internet-related disputes to date cited in your speech, one occurred five years ago. Our view is that it is harmful for the Commission to impose industry-wide rules based upon speculation about what may occur in the future."

By definition, if it has happened in the past it isn't just "speculation about what may happen in the future," but the point still stands. In the US, there have not been many documented instances of neutrality violations—though the Comcast P2P throttling case last year was quite significant.

But throw wireless Internet access into the mix (which Genachowski wants to do) and the "neutrality" infractions come thick and fast. For one example, just read AT&T's terms of service for wireless data services, which prohibit all sorts of Internet activities, including: "downloading movies using P2P file sharing services, redirecting television signals for viewing on Personal Computers, web broadcasting, and/or for the operation of servers, telemetry devices and/or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition." Until last week, using VoIP from an iPhone could be added to that list.

The issue is also complicated by the fact that the worries of the net neutralists didn't arise from fever dreams but from the public pronouncements of people like former AT&T boss Ed Whitacre, people whose stated goal was to charge content providers more money for faster access to customers because Internet companies were somehow "using my pipes for free." While this didn't happen, it certainly wasn't because carriers didn't want it to happen.

In the absence of the FCC's Internet policy statement, which was drafted under Republican leadership, it's not clear what might have been tried. Perhaps the fairest point to be made about the whole situation is that the US has seen very few wireline violations of basic neutrality principles in the last five years while operating under a regulatory framework in which neutrality principles (rather than rules) were in effect. Whether that means no such rules are desirable depends on one's political point of view, and it's clear where the 18 senators who signed the letter stand on the matter.

Fortunately, US broadband users are able to debate these matters while "enjoying the best online experience that has ever been available."

Innovate at the core or the edge?

While the senators' letter is concerned only with the position of ISPs, the two Republican FCC Commissioners have a more nuanced view. The Senate letter says nothing about how net neutrality might well stimulate investment on the edges of the network, providing the sort of platform certainty that encourages the creation of new Googles and Yahoos even as it might lower profit margins from ISPs who increasingly become "dumb pipes" or "bit haulers."

Baker and McDowell recognize this dynamic. "As we analyze this situation further," they wrote after Genachowski's speech, "we remain hopeful that any future Commission action will create an atmosphere that is conducive to promoting freedom, investment and innovation not only at the edge of the Internet but at its core as well."

The issue is complicated politically for Republicans by the fact that some conservative groups actually support net neutrality quite strongly. Take the Christian Coalition, which defends American's "godly heritage" by rallying support against the "government takeover" of healthcare, the nonexistent return of the Fairness Doctrine, and gay marriage... but which also wants to defend net neutrality. In fact, in 2007 the group even said that net neutrality was its second most important issue, due to concerns that a non-neutral net could harm small church websites and organizations like the Coalition.

Whatever happens, though, Republicans should probably keep GOP head Michael Steele far away from the issue; the first line of his first blog post on the newly revamped GOP.com this week consists of: "The Internet has been around a while, now."