So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better
education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as
that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse
in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way - a
conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from
individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role
played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely
low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in
history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting
individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a
platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and
distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized
mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's
a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be
developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets
- through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise
of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to
protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for
our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the
survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open
and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of
individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet
service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this
future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the
threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet
marketplace of ideas.

The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small
number of broadband network operators. These operators have the
structural capacity to determine the way in which information is
transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered.
And the present Internet network operators - principally large telephone
and cable companies - have an economic incentive to extend their control
over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of
Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these
companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the
free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling
ways.