Forbes magazine has been running a series of columns on telecom issues lately. Guest commentators have written on such topics as video franchising and net neutrality.

Today brings a different look at Net Neutrality as seen by a telecom lawyer. Peter Huber argues that the one group net neutrality will definitely be good for are his fellow lawyers.

The new Congress is determined to enact a “net neutrality” bill. Nobody yet knows what those two words mean. The new law won’t provide any intelligible answer, either. It will, however, put a real drag on new capital investment in faster digital pipes by making it illegal for many big companies to help pay for them, while leaving everyone guessing about the details for years. That last bit is great news for all the telecom lawyers (like me) who get paid far too much to make sense out of idiotic new laws like this one…

…A simple two-word law is all we really need–an equal rights amendment for bits.

It will be a 2 million-word law by the time Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and the courts are done with it. Grand principles always end up as spaghetti in this industry, because they aim to regulate networks that are far more complicated than anything you have ever seen heaped up beside an amusing little glass of chianti.

If anything should make you nervous about a net neutrality bill, it should be the gleeful amusement of a telecom lawyer chortling about the billable hours he’ll incur trying to make sense of it for a bewildered public. That alone should tell you this bill is not what its proponents would have you believe.

Courtesy of Drudge is this report from the New York Observer quoting Joe Biden on Barack Obama.

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Oh, so I guess Jesse Jackson was dirty and inarticulate. Honestly, did he just refer to an African-American leader (he is, for better or worse) as unclean?

To be fair, Biden could have said worse. Last year he amazed people by telling an Indian-American “In Delaware… you can’t go into a 7-11 or Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

I guess Biden’s speechwriter didn’t give him the draft that referred to Jackson as a ‘dirty house ni**er’, the Indian-Americans as ‘dots not feathers’ and asked if the Hispanics in attendance ‘had finished mowing his lawn’ yet.

Seriously, if this guy was a Republican, you’d be able to hear the Democrats screaming if you were halfway around the world. This jackass, however, keeps getting a pass. What is the likelihood that Matt Stoller will post on the racism of Joe Biden?

When you’re not John Kerry, and flub a joke badly, the media will apparently come to your defense. Just ask Hillary Clinton. When a supporter asked her what in her background had prepared her to deal with evil men, she replied, without answering, by repeating the question and offering a shrug of the shoulders and a humorous expression. The clear implication was she has run into a few.

Many people would count a lecherous husband with a predilection for young unattractive women on that list… But not the media. The Today show went out of its way to find Democrat operatives willing to deflect that potential slap in the face to her mate. Did they offer any Republicans, who immediately thought of Bill, to confirm that the joke could easily have been an insult to her husband? Nope. In fact, they offered Hillary’s direct contradiction:

Hillary: “I don’t think anybody in here thought that, I’m sorry.”

When you’re the media darling, you get to botch a punch line. When you’re a stodgy buffoon that narrowly lost the White House but held on to $15 million dollars, you don’t get that leeway.

Scott Cleland runs an outfit called NetCompetition.org that is opposed to Net Neutrality. He and I have crossed paths on the net neutrality debate and he’s a good guy – he’s also a solid Republican (in the fiscal conservative, responsible government way). On his company blog he took a look at Google’s plans to insinuate itself into the political discourse and to become the measure of what’s true and what isn’t in candidate debates.

Given the fact Google’s contributions to political candidates in the last election leaned Democrat by a ratio of 49 to 1, that thought should scare Republicans. At what point do Google’s “impartial” search results become nothing more than an indoctrination into liberal philosophy? What the Democrat says is true but the Republican lies. Is that how it will work?

At any rate, Scott has an interesting take.

Last March I took issue with the RNC’s MyGOP tool for it’s overly senstive obscenity filter. As I was writing the previous post about the AdWeek article, I stumbled upon a mention of McCain’s very creative “MySite” tool. It allows you to create your own site on the McCain teams page.

Sensing a knock-off of the RNC’s MyGOP tool, I clicked through to start building my page. Sure enough, the tool is an almost exact replica of the GOP tool. To be fair, the tool should probably get much better traction on a candidate site than it did with the committee. People are more inclined to gravitate toward a campaign.

The one problem I have is the fact that McCain ported the entire application with warts and all. The biggest wart, as I pointed out last year, is the timid obscenity filter. I plugged in KungFuQuip.ExploreMcCain.com as my url. They rejected me, quite literally, for the fuq of it.

What the fuq is this world coming to when I can’t use my fuqing url because some fuqing bonehead is concerned that other fuqing people have nothing better to do than fuqing dream up ways I might misspell fuqing obscenities?