Is "net neutrality" too geeky?

Photo by Julia Roy.  Licensed via Creative Commons.

Renay San Miguel of TechNewsWorld laments two overtones that he says have been imbued into the term "net neutrality": geekiness and government intrusion.

He says he favor a "freedom" frame, but at the same time, he seems content to stick with geekiness and only once refer to freedom in his suggested replacements for the term "net neutrality" (note that I've bolded geeky terms and italicized his one freedom term):

...my advice for any representative or senator willing to pick up the mantle of "Net neutrality": Avoid that now-cliche like ... well, you know ... a botnet-enabled plague.

The words are now not only fraught with political baggage that can be used in a Drudge Report headline denoting overbearing government interference or a Huffington Post piece about big business messing with your downloads; they also just sound too damn geeky for anybody's good. Ideological stereotypes, like pirated movie files, flow freely in the media canals of the Internet, so why play into that anymore? Call it "Net equality," "high-speed freedom," "I can't drive 55 (Mbps)," whatever. Just stay away from the chamber of commerce-style (or in this case, government-approved) labels.

The wikipedia entry for the concept of net(work) neutrality has a few different frames:

• freedom ("no restrictions on content, sites, or platforms")
  
• equality/fairness ("if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, that the two users should be able to connect to each other")
  
• competition (net neutrality fights practices that "remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services")
  
• inclusion (fights "against the fragmentation of the net whenever this becomes excluding to other participants")
  
• consumerism ("Consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire...Consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer")
  
• openness ("Open application...Open devices...Open services...Open networks")
  
• choice ("access the lawful Internet content of their choice...run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement...connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network")
  
• control ("Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet")

The better frames listed above are those that are consumer-focused and not technology-focused, so in a sense I agree with Renay San Miguel when he says the frame should be less "geek" and more "freedom."  The frame needs to trigger that heart switch of being wronged when a merchant gives you bad customer service or something less than what you thought you would get.

So San Miguel's framing instinct may be on the right track, but judging from his three suggestions for a replacement term, I think he needs to work on his stickiness instinct.

My fellow framers: leave your suggestion in the comments.