Network Neutrality
Network neutrality is one of the key factors leading to the current wild success of the Internet. The basic idea of network neutrality is that all traffic is treated equally, so that there is no effective difference between my grandmother sending an email, my friend connecting to a P2P network, or my using FTP to upload data to my website. In case you were wondering, network neutrality has existed since the earliest days of the Internet, and is only now being challenged.
You see, there are several big-wig ISPs who think that it would be an excellent idea to eliminate network neutrality. Their reasoning: companies like Google, eBay, Vonage and Amazon are making scads of money by offering services to end users like you and me. The ISPs feel that because their assets and labor (the network infrastructure of wires and cables, along with the support staff who keeps everything running) is the only thing allowing these Internet companies to exist, they should be paying the ISPs for all the bandwidth their applications and websites consume. Seems reasonable, right? It is, until you consider that the ISPs are already being paid for their services: by you and me. Other ISPs are being paid by the big companies, and all the ISPs involved are making a pretty penny.
The primary reason that an ISP would want to eliminate network neutrality is to force their way in true monopolistic fashion into the Internet service market. For example, if Comcast offers a VOIP telephony service, they can market it to their subscribers as a package deal with their Internet and television packages, which is something they have every right to do. However, if network neutrality is not required, then Comcast can hinder, cripple, or outright prevent VOIP traffic from any other vendor (such as Vonage), making it impossible for those other vendors to compete, unless those providers create their own network infrastructure (which is not only prohibitively expensive, but downright stupid, since it would necessitate running potentially thousands of separate network cables to every home) or by paying Comcast a potentially exorbitant license fee to allow their data to pass unhindered.
As any Economics 101 course will teach you, if there is only one (or even very few) providers of a given resource, it is possible for those providers to charge pretty much whatever price they see fit, to both the end users, like you and I, and to the “upstart” companies who are trying to eke out a niche in the online world. To use a more tangible real-world example, eliminating network neutrality would be roughly equivalent to giving control of all roads to Walmart, and if anyone wanted to drive to Safeway, K-mart, or JC Pennies, either the shopper or the store would be required to give Walmart its pound of flesh.
An amendment to a House Bill that would have enforced network neutrality was recently defeated, though there is another similar bill propagating through the Senate. If you like the Internet the way it is, and don’t feel like paying through the nose for new services, please let your elected officials know.