Since winning election to the US Senate in 2008, Al Franken (D-MN) has become one of that chamber's top net neutrality defenders. With the House uninterested in compromise on the issue, the real push to gut the FCC's existing net neutrality order will take place this year in the Senate.

Last week, Franken and three other senators drafted a letter in which they blasted the House for trying to "defund" the FCC's net neutrality enforcement. House Republicans "claim to stand for freedom," the letter says (PDF). "But the only freedom they are providing for is the freedom of telephone and cable companies to determine the future of the Internet, where you can go on it, what you can attach to it, and which services will win or lose on it."

Franken has even gone so far as to call net neutrality the "First Amendment issue of our time." Those are tough words, but Franken remains convinced of their truth, even as he supports a controversial plan to censor websites over concerns about piracy and counterfeiting. (That legislation, called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act or COICA, is currently under consideration.)

Franken carved a few minutes out of his busy schedule to speak with Ars about net neutrality, the ways that elected officials talk about it, and why COICA really isn't a bad idea—it just needs a few tweaks and a new coat of paint.

The Ars interview

Ars Technica: Net neutrality—people are curious about your support for it, and why you support it when there is not, as one commentator put it, “any true Internet fire.” This is the argument that the big ISPs are making, that there's really no problem here to be addressed; why don't we wait until there's a problem?

Sen. Franken: Because once you wait until there's a problem, then there may be no going back. It's precautionary. I mean, it's a very clear path if you have paid prioritization, you have a fast lane that content providers can pay for. If that happens, then it's kind of all over. So this is about keeping the Internet the way it is. That's what net neutrality is. It's about maintaining the architecture we have, which has created all this innovation and which doesn't favor the big corporate interests over individuals and small innovators, keeping it the free zone that it is.

Ars: In this debate, both sides tend to use the word “innovation” a lot. The ISPs that I hear from are always complaining that this is going to stifle their innovation, that they can't invest in their networks. Are you worried about that impeding the development of US Internet?

Sen. Franken: No. I think the Internet has developed at this incredibly rapid pace because of net neutrality, because of the free nature of it, because a YouTube can start the way YouTube started. If they want all the innovation to be done by them [laughter], then I can understand that attitude. But the nature of the Internet and the importance of net neutrality is that innovation can come from everyone.

Ars: You have called network neutrality the “First Amendment issue of our time.” We had a lot of push back on that from readers who are upset about other issues in the last decade such as warrantless wiretaps, Patriot Act misuse, the new COICA censorship legislation… why is net neutrality really that fundamental?

Sen. Franken: Well, because if you have a few ISPs essentially running the whole show and they're charging for a fast lane, then really the information that people are going to get is going to be corporate information. People are getting more and more of their information on the Internet and this will mean that the speech will be controlled by big corporate interests. They'll be the only ones able to pay for the faster access, and that essentially will be what people get. That's why I call it the First Amendment issue of our time.

Ars: You're making these arguments in Congress, a body not always renowned for its technical savvy. Staffers handle a lot of these issues, but it's the Representatives and Senators who vote and have to make a decision on these issues. Are you happy with the level of congressional discourse about things like network neutrality?

Sen. Franken: Not really. There are some who get it and some who don't… let's just put it that way. [Laughter]

Ars: So what do you do about that, given the importance of the issue?

Sen. Franken: Well, we'll see. I wasn't entirely happy with what the FCC did on this, but at least it wasn't a step backward, it was a step forward. Now, I guess last night the House voted to defund any kind of implementation of the FCC's order, and so there's going to be a fight in the Senate on that. That will be sort of my first test, I think, of a Senate-wide debate on this. That will be the first time I really start engaging the whole Senate on this issue.

Ars: Just to clarify, when you said you weren't entirely happy with the FCC's net neutrality order, was that because they didn't go far enough in the direction that you wanted?

Sen. Franken: Right, yes. They basically created two Internets, wireless and wired. They didn't specifically ban paid prioritization.

Ars: You talked about "two Internets"—let's switch gears to COICA, because there has been some complaining on the tech side that COICA could bifurcate the Internet by setting up an American-driven censorship regime involving the Domain Name Service that could cut us off from what's going on in other places. But you support COICA. Why is this a good approach to the online piracy problem?

Sen. Franken: First of all, I understand the concerns. If anyone wants to look at the questioning I had the other day at the hearing, you'll see that I voiced those concerns, the very concerns I'm sure that your readers are voicing.

The other side of this, of course, is that this is about, essentially, stealing copyrighted material and selling counterfeit goods. This goes to tens of billions of dollars in theft. Some of the supporters of this were after the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists, the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild… I happen to belong to all three of those unions. This doesn't just affect the jobs of writers and directors and producers; when they're free to steal all this intellectual material, it changes the business model of a movie. So it really costs the jobs of the technicians and the crew and the craft services people. It changes the entire business model for the industry. It's not just movies and TV, it's everything.

I understand the need to move cautiously when you're creating a structure that will direct Internet service providers to block content at the domain level. That's why last year when we passed this, I tried to tighten the definition of who could be targeted under the bill, the sites whose central purpose was to infringe, and hopefully that would do the job of motivating domains to get rid of those sites. This has worked very well on child pornography.

More on censorship

Franken, as actor, writer, and director himself, has a real stake in these issues. As he put it during a February 16, 2011 Senate hearing on COICA, "When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn't exist, and we didn't need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online." (Read his full statement.)

But he wants the legislation altered. "We need to work together to make sure that any legislation that is introduced this Congress is narrowly tailored and will not unwittingly lead to the blocking of legitimate speech that is protected by the First Amendment," he said. "We also need to make sure that we are giving legitimate US businesses and domestic blogs sufficient due process protections before their sites are suddenly shut down."

As for the DNS issues we spoke about, Franken reminded the Senate "of a letter we received from 90 engineers and architects of the Internet who were particularly concerned about the domain name remedy that was created under your bill. I agree with [the] concern about maintaining the integrity of the Internet, and I hope we can examine this issue further at today's hearing to make sure this is the best approach."

Video of Franken's six minutes of questions at the hearing is available at his website for those who want to see him hold forth on COICA at a bit more length. We'd like to thank Senator Franken for making time in his schedule to speak with us.