So says Tony Bradley over at PC World:

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Julius Genachowski is expected to announce a plan on Monday to formalize the idea of net neutrality. The move, which supports a campaign promise made by President Barack Obama, will prevent the information superhighway from becoming a toll road giving preferential treatment to those who pay for it.

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The announcement is also predicted to expand the scope of the concept of net neutrality to include broadband wireless service. A formal net neutrality guideline preventing preferential treatment of certain content or services could be applied to situations like the Google Voice app rejection by Apple, which the FCC is already investigating.

This is good news. A free and open, content-neutral Internet is what created things like blogs, online video, online activism, and much more that we take for granted every day. Formally endorsing net neutrality is a step towards saving that.

For those not familiar with the term and the arguments, here is the explanation:

Borrowing the ever-popular Information Superhighway analogy, allowing providers to discriminate between types of traffic and offer preferential access to their own content or traffic from customers who pay the most is the equivalent of privatizing the United States highway system.

Imagine if private companies owned the highways and had the ability to control which lanes you could drive in based on your ability to pay. Large corporate customers with enormous budgets would get to fly by in the left lane of the highway. Smaller businesses and individuals who can afford it would get to drive on the slower highway lanes-frequently slowed down by frustrating construction projects. Average consumers would not be allowed on the highway at all. They would be forced to drive on surface streets-plodding along at a snail’s pace, constantly interrupted by stop signs and street lights.

The Internet, and all of the resources it has to offer, is too vital to allow access to be restricted in this way. While the battle lines are drawn along more frivolous lines like whether or not Comcast can impede traffic to BitTorrent, allowing any discrimination at all is a slippery slope that can evolve into much more negative consequences.

It should be pretty clear why this stuff is important. If one day corporations that pay telecom providers more money could deliver you faster service, those without the money (for example, bloggers) would have their sites load more slowly than those with money (the mainstream media). For traffic telecom providers didn’t like (like file-sharing), your data might not move at all.

More information can be found at Free Press’s great site, SaveTheInternet.com.