A friend just sent me a story from Monday’s Guardian U.K., on control of the net by corporations, a.k.a. “net neutrality.” I’ve been writing about this issue since the early ’90s, back when I was writing Inside Technology at the San Francisco Examiner. And then again at Digital Media. And again at Technology & Media. And then at NYT. And again, now, still, same as it ever d**m was.

Back before the days of AT&T deregulation, it wasn’t called Net Neutrality. It was called “conduit v content,” and AT&T — kind of the King God of conduit owners — had long been banned from controlling what traversed it.

You know, that pesky First Amendment and all that.

But deregulation shifted those sands as Judge Greene’s Modified Final Judgment that ruled who could do what after the breakup was slowly but surely modified to death in the courts.

Nicholas Johnson, a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission from 1966 to 1973, was the only commish who was raising a ruckus about the importance of the issue back then. He called it “the No. 1 public policy issue confronting our nation,” critical for providing the “channels of communication for a democratic society.”

It makes me very cranky that we are still dealing with this fracking issue.

I’m on the advisory board of Public Knowledge, a tremendous organization run by the irrepressible Gigi Sohn, which does killer work in this area. Fight it. Hard. We won’t know what we’ve lost until it’s gone.