WASHINGTON – Under a proposal floated Monday by the Federal Communications Commission’s chairman, the nation’s media watchdog would become a “smart cop on the beat” with increased responsibility for defending so-called network neutrality.As outlined by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski during a speech at the Brookings Institution, the agency would become an aggressive enforcer of citizens’ rights to unencumbered access to the Web. Internet service providers would be prohibited from blocking or slowing traffic based on applications or content.

As might be expected, ISPs erupted immediately, claiming potential harm to their networks from lack of ability to manage traffic. The cellular communications industry argued it should be exempt from any net-neutrality regulations because competition in the sector is healthy. Wireline carriers — which increasingly have come under fire for “managing their networks” by choking bandwidth used by specific file-sharing applications — shot back that exempting one category of ISPs would give that sector an unfair advantage.

Others voiced concern about how decisions regarding “acceptable content” would be made.

“Should all product and service offerings be the same?” Chris Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for the wireless association CTIA, asked in a statement.

A spokesman for Genachowski said all the critics are getting way ahead of the game. The FCC hasn’t even begun drawing up regulatory guidelines, he noted.

“This is the announcement of the beginning of a process,” Colin Crowell, a senior adviser to Genachowski, told The Washington Post. “The chairman said two things with respect to mobile: first, that the principles ought to apply to all platforms, in order to be technologically neutral. The principals ideally apply in a technologically neutral way so that your expectations as a consumer and entrepreneur don’t change as you choose different ways of reaching the internet. Second, he indicated that how, to what extent and when the principles will apply to different platforms is what the process will determine.”

If and when the commission actually launches the proposed net-neutrality initiative, suspected violations of the concept will be judged on a case-by-case basis, Genachowski indicated.

“This approach, within the framework I am proposing today, will allow the commission to make reasoned, fact-based determinations based on the internet before it — not based on the internet of years past or guesses about how the internet will evolve,” Genachowski told the Brookings Institution audience.

“This is not about protecting the internet against imaginary dangers,” he said. “We’re seeing the breaks and cracks emerge, and they threaten to change the internet’s fundamental architecture of openness.”