So what’s the worst thing you could call a good old American-style captain of industry? “Commie” springs to mind, and that’s just about what an Obama administration official called corporate opponents of proposed net neutrality rules this week.

Several times in recent weeks, White House deputy chief technology officer Andrew McLaughlin compared censorship in China — where President Obama’s recent comments on open Internet values were blocked from Chinese Web sites — to the need for net neutrality rules that would prohibit corporations (mostly the big ISPs) from acting as gatekeepers of information and speech.

“If it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it,” McLaughlin said at a recent policy conference.

McLaughlin’s remarks were consistent with his pre-public service position on the topic. He joined an administration that’s made net neutrality a cornerstone of its technology agenda.

McLaughlin and others in the new government maintain that one secret to the rapid success of the Web has been unfettered access to it. Letting corporations have the power to control that access, by slowing down or blocking certain sites and giving priority to others, would diminish that freedom of access.

As you can imagine, ISPs don’t like net neutrality or any curbs on their control of Internet traffic. They don’t like it even a little bit.

Likening a great capitalist institution like AT&T to an evil communist empire especially didn’t sit well with the telecom’s chief lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, who fired off his own statement, saying it was  “ill-considered and inflammatory” to connect censorship in China to the practices of American ISPs. Just why, he didn’t really say.

“It is deeply disturbing when someone in a position of authority, like Mr. McLaughlin, is so intent on advancing his argument for regulation that he equates the outright censorship decisions of a communist government to the network congestion decisions of an American ISP.

“There is no valid comparison, and it’s frankly an affront to suggest otherwise,” Cicconi said, who used to work in the White House for  George H. W. Bush., but who’s now gone the way of many former public servants — into the ranks of industry lobbyists.

For perspective, the Computer and Communications Industry Association also weighed in — on the side of the Obama administration’s efforts to keep Internet access from being controlled by corporate interests.

Said the CCIA leader, Ed Black: “CCIA is encouraged that this administration with truly tech-savvy people on board along with those who understand and respect the Constitution, will find ways through the minefields of powerful special interests to make universal access to an open Internet a fundamental American free speech protection.”

This fight should heat up in the coming months. Stay tuned for more histrionics and name calling. The fun’s just getting started.

Tags: net neutrality