Mark Cuban is known these days for being the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, a team he took from years of malaise to the NBA Finals. He didn’t get his start in sports though, no. He made his money in a pair of business ventures. First he sold a company called MicroSolutions – a hardware and software integrator – to CompuServe. From there he joined what became broadcast.com – an online multimedia streaming service – which netted him the billions in a sale to Yahoo. He’s since stayed in the broadcast field, now heading a venture called HDNet – a high definition video broadcasting service.

Suffice it to say Mark Cuban knows audio and video broadcasting.

So when Mark Cuban writes a lengthy article explaining in great detail how Senator Al “Stuart Smalley” Franken is completely, totally, and utterly wrong in his pronouncements on the future of online video, I listen.

Cuban conclusively shows how Franken’s proposed government mandates would make the Internet more expensive for everyone, would cripple a media giant, and make online television worse for the people who do use it today. Nobody wins under the Franken plan.

This idea is so bad, it’s a good thing the Democrats aren’t also proposing to regulate the entire Internet, in some sort of “Net Neutrality” scheme. Then they might really goof up.