Net neutrality is the latest slogan in the battle over the “digital divide,” the notion that high technology in general, and the Internet in particular, automatically created a vast new division of haves and have-nots, which will persist unless politicians pass new laws and impose new regulations.

In the digital-divide vision, the market is inadequate to bridge the gap, ever widening with each innovation. Indeed, in this view the market is the very cause of the divide and its inequities. At the beginning of this decade, national spokesmen such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson adopted the digital divide as the civil-rights issue of our time. Jackson called it “classic apartheid,” while Kweisi Mfume of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called it “technological segregation.” President Bill Clinton urged a “national crusade” against it.

The slogan, and some of the same rhetoric, duly arose in testimony on net neutrality before the FCC in 2007. Material submitted by the American Library Association charged that allowing ISPs or broadband providers to discriminate against certain traffic would “exacerbate the digital divide and reduce consumer choice.”

Interestingly, though, not all those who adduce the digital divide advocate net neutrality. The NAACP urged the FCC to remove barriers to broadband deployment in underserved areas—“Only then can the technological segregation formerly known as the Digital Divide be narrowed.” However, the NAACP did not specifically call for net neutrality as a way to boost broadband deployment. Neither did Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/ PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) Coalition. In a statement to the FCC, Rainbow/PUSH called on broadband providers to continue “to invest in the development of the next-generation of the Internet for as many residents of our cities and towns as possible.” The Coalition “recognizes the need for broadband to enter all communities so everyone has the equitable opportunity to succeed in today’s digital economy.” Since the Internet is so entrenched, “we must do whatever is in our power to sustain its usage and deployment.” But the Coalition makes no specific demand for net neutrality.