Government vs. Internet (The Brawl in Cyberspace)

What power should governments have over the internet, if any?

The opportunity for abuses of power by the government with the internet are very vast. Considering that the internet is the ultimate forum for free speech, tampering with the internet via censorship and control of access is a violation of free speech rights. We addressed a part of this in the last post, whether the internet is a human right. My response being that if the technology and access is there, then restricting it is indeed a violation of that right.
Often advances to control and pass regulatory legislation regarding the internet are done under the banner of opening a forum for capitalism.

The Communication Decency Act was one of the first example of this, a very absurd attempt at regulating the internet back in 97. Today, Net Neutrality being one of the top issues as the bill comes up over and over again. The concept that your ISP could control what you access on the internet is such a massive danger to free speech, and a massive opportunity to capitalize by major corporations. Thankfully the EFF has rallied the tech savvy groups to protest such a move every time the bill comes up in the House. Every time it has been shot down, despite having some of the more poorly informed senators representing the people of the internet (ie. Ted Stevens and "the series of tubes")

Recently we've seen the birth of data capping among Comcast internet networks in some states. Once again this is a slippery slope (currently the cap is set very high at something around 200 GB.) Right now people will have to pay if they download/ upload too much through their internet (right now only people who download an absurd amount of movies and such are at risk.) We've seen this capping at Virginia Tech as well, a pseudo response to what they perceive to be examples of illegal P2P activity. (Granted Data capping is not uncommon as we see it often with smart phone 3 and 4G networks. However the justification is the cost of making and maintaining these networks)

In foreign countries the examples abound of governments blatantly censoring or outright shutting down the internet for it's citizenry. The concept is not surprising because the internet is a great opportunity to get the word out about abusive governments, as well as spreading new ideas that are dangerous to the powerful heads of state. The US thankfully has been fairly good about keeping the internet free, but it has been a very real struggle to maintain that. In less free countries it is not surprising that the civilians don't have the ability to fight against these overreaching moves by their own governments. That's why "hacktivists" have a responsibility to reach out to these people help provide them a means to fight back at least in cyberspace via private publishing and file sharing. There are some obvious things the government should intervene on: violations of copyright, piracy in some formats, etc. However free speech should never be on the chopping block.