It was a year ago, this coming Friday, that Senator Barack Obama put up a podcast about Network Neutrality.

It is because the Internet is a neutral platform that I can put out this podcast and transmit it over the Internet without having to go through any corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship or without having to pay a special charge.

But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the Internet as we know it. They say that they want to create high speed lanes on the Internet and strike exclusive contractual agreements with Internet content providers for access to those high speed lanes.

I applaud him for those comments. However, an entry on techPresident, Did Facebook Play Favorites with Obama? raises some interesting questions.

While the Internet itself is a neutral platform, some sites can be much more important in getting your message out than others. Facebook is a good example of such a site. The techPresident article raises an important question of whether or not Facebook provided an unfair advantage to the Obama campaign. Where there ethical lapses or FEC violations?

I don’t know the details of what happened and I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t touch the FEC question. However, if the Obama team did have access to privileged information it raises some interesting questions about how it should have been handled.

During Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid, I worked with a bunch of volunteer programmers. We started off calling ourselves Hack4Dean, and later changed it to DeanSpace. We were working with Open Source software, in particular, Drupal. We had lively discussions about how widely or tightly controlled our developments should be shared. Many argued that the software could give Gov. Dean a competitive advantage and should not be made available to others. Hypotheticals were presented about whether or not people would feel comfortable with Republicans using the software.

I was always the idealist. Open software should be open. What matters isn’t the software, but what you do with it, and for that matter, what your choices about software say about you. I still have these arguments today and I can well see the other side.

If there was some sort of special agreement between Facebook and the Obama campaign, what does it say about Obama’s commitment to keeping the Internet a neutral platform? What does it say about his commitment to the ideals of Network Neutrality?

Perhaps nothing. I’m sure that is what the more fervent Obama supporters will say. Perhaps they are right. Yet the old idealist in me still feels a little uncomfortable.

(Cross posted at MyDD)