Al Senia writes, "will private greed once again trump the public good under the Bush Administration? It sure will if some Republicans get their way over the FCC's proposal to auction a section of spectrum in return for a commitment by the winner to provide free Internet access on a portion of it."

There are other problems with the plan, issues that are drawing liberal opposition too. Wendy Selzer points out that the program requires the ISP to filter out pornography, and that it allows the ISP to block legitimate content that is delivered in a way the ISP cannot monitor. Rightly, she sees this as a very bad precedent.

I would be like making VCRs illegal because they could be used to play legal pornographic films. In reality, the Supreme Court made the opposite decision in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417 (1984).