Last week, Cisco Senior VP Charles Giancarlo trotted out America's weak standing in several global statistics, then issued a call for a national broadband plan. What starts as a reasonable request for some kind of unified country broadband policy (since, well, we lack one), quickly becomes a call for deregulation and a criticism of network neutrality: "We also cannot tie the hands of the Internet through additional regulation, such as 'net neutrality,' which eliminates the ability of the Internet to support new applications."

Cisco shares the incumbent profit vision of a "two-tier Internet"; note a recent company whitepaper (pdf) by Cisco that explores their desire to turn the Internet from "basic highway" into a "personalized toll way." Last June, Cisco CEO John Chambers argued that the two-tier Internet provided a "high probability of reasonable return."

Bloggers like David Isenberg and Doc Searls had plenty to say about Giancarlo's editorial. "If Mr. Giancarlo wants to fight regulation, he should watch how his cableco and telco buddies lobby for laws to prohibit competition by citizens whose only practical choice is to work with local and regional governments toward getting better broadband that those carriers fail to deliver," argues Searls.