That’s one way to do it:

Not content to wait for Congress to act, a group of Maryland state legislators is backing a smaller-scale attempt at putting a Net neutrality mandate in place.

Delegate Herman Taylor, a Democrat who represents a county just outside of Washington D.C., introduced House Bill 1069 on Feburary 9. As of Friday, more than 20 of his colleagues had signed on as co-sponsors.

It’s probably good idea to start working on this as a state-based issue since the federal government doesn’t seem to be making any headway. Big teleco just has too much sway in Washington and I doubt the general public really has any concept of the implications behind messing with our “series of tubes” to exert any meaningful grassroots pressure.

This reminded me, however, of an idea I was once toying with about internationalizing this debate. For example, I recall reading about certain provisions in NAFTA that allow corporations and states to sue if policies are enacted that threaten profit potential (I’m pretty sure the WTO has taken a similar approach). This is what has allowed bottled water companies to sue Canada and Mexico over environmental policies. In my humble opinion, this is patently unfair – particularly since such supra-national institutions were never subject to democratic will. That being said, I wonder if this holds any precedent for the current debate.

Much as we in the US might claim ownership of “the internet”, it is an international good to which all countries have more or less equal access via the open DNS. As someone who owns and operates a small website in Ireland that specifically targets traffic in the United States, I represent exactly the kind of international entity that would be effectively screwed by the implementation of a tiered system. Of course, my site operates at a permanent loss (donations, anyone?) so I doubt I personally have a grievance, though certainly there are larger multinationals that would.

This then raises the question: does the United States’ failure to enforce homogenized network access violate our trade agreement under international law? Does failure to legislate against preferential data transfer effectively amount to a form of negative legislation in which profits are unlawfully threatened?

I have exactly zero legal training, so I would be very interested in hearing your opinions on the subject.