The net neutrality riddle: why are Edward Snowden's supporters so eager to give government more control over the Internet?

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

There's a telling moment in Laura Poitras' Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour. As Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower at the center of the film, packs his bags in a Hong Kong hotel for a desperately uncertain future, the camera lingers for a beat on the book near Snowden's ever-present laptop: Cory Doctorow's novel Homeland.

As sci-fi nerds can tell you, Homeland is no random novel. The book tells the tale of a wary, civil libertarian college-dropout hacker who has in his possession a four-gigabyte file of nefarious government documents, which he seeks to release even as powerful interests stalk his every move. Sound familiar?

The novelist is also no ordinary scribbler. In addition to producing Prometheus Award-winning novels, Cory Doctorow is an influential copyright reform activist and co-editor of the hugely popular tech-culture group weblog BoingBoing. As the media thinker Lawrence Lessig pointed out last year, Citizenfour's core audience of geeks recognized Homeland as one of several key "internal references," along with the stickers on Snowden's laptop from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the online privacy tool Tor. "If you are a public official on the wrong side of this fight," Lessig proclaimed, "that core will stand against you."

But that's not quite true. Or at least, it's not the whole story. As I watched Citizenfour for the first time the day after the Academy Awards, the Doctorow reference felt bittersweet.

That's because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was on the cusp of a long-telegraphed 3-2 vote along party lines to place unprecedented regulatory controls onto the Internet. And one of the key lobbies supporting the FCC's intrusion was led in part by none other than Cory Doctorow himself.

Under the vague banner of "net neutrality"--once technical jargon, now a surprisingly effective political slogan--federal regulators unceremoniously shoved the Internet out of the less-regulated "information service" category and reclassified it as a "telecommunications service," thus subjecting it to oversight under the far more hands-on Tide 11 of the Telecommunications Act. The aim, in the words of supporters such as Doctorow, is to forcibly prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon from "extract[ing] ransom from everyone you want to talk to on the internet." That such ransom notes have stubbornly failed to materialize has been deemed...