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Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas has joined an effort that includes rocker Moby and the founder of Craigslist in urging Congress to preserve freedom on the Internet.

Saying the Internet is a "critical medium for religious speech," Kicanas, head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, wrote a letter Tuesday to the House of Representatives on the issue. He was writing in his role as chairman of the communications committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

He argued for federal protections to prevent Internet access providers from creating what some call a potentially two-tiered Internet in which providers charge Web sites and give them preferred delivery.

Without specific language to preserve neutrality, broadband service providers can charge those who run Web sites for preferred delivery of digital content, Kicanas and others say.

"Unless there are in place protections against Internet access providers' control over content, noncommercial religious speech on the Internet is threatened," Kicanas wrote. He asked that "net neutrality requirements" be included in the the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act, recently passed by a House subcommittee.

"The Internet is open to any speaker, commercial or non-commercial, whether or not the speech is connected financially to the company providing Internet access, whether it is popular or prophetic," he added. "Those characteristics make the Internet critical to noncommercial religious speakers."

Radio, broadcast television and cable television are largely closed to religious messages, he noted, and the environment for noncommercial religious voices in broadcasting is a hostile one.

"If the Internet becomes, as it inevitably will without strong protections for Net neutrality, a medium where speakers must pay to deliver their messages, religious speech will be effectively barred from the Internet," he wrote.

Kicanas noted that Pope Benedict XVI, in a message for this year's 40th World Communications Day, warned against the "distortion that occurs when the media industry becomes self-serving or solely profit-driven, losing the sense of accountability to the common good."

Kicanas is not alone in his concern for the future of the Internet. A coalition, SavetheInternet.com, has formed, in addition to Artists and Musicians for Internet Freedom, which has attracted the support of such well-known performers as Nine Inch Nails and the Dixie Chicks. The effort also has the support of Google executives and some other high-profile Web names.