Life in the Slow Lane: A Guide to the Un-Neutral Net

LIFE IN THE SLOW LANE: A GUIDE TO THE UN-NEUTRAL NET
[SOURCE: Center for Digital Democracy]
[Commentary] After more than a year of debate in Washington, the fate of Network Neutrality --and with it the future of the Internet -- remains unresolved. A strong tide of public opposition to new telecommunications legislation in both the House (H.R. 5252) and Senate (S. 2686), led by Save the Internet.com and other advocacy groups, forestalled what would have been a major victory for a relative handful of cable operators and telephone companies. Had Congress completed its rewrite of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, broadband network operators would have been free to institute new "tiered" or "differentiated" levels of service, based on discriminatory, fee-based traffic-management schemes. The matter will now be taken up anew in 2007 in the 110th (and now Democratic-majority) Congress. At stake is nothing less than the future of the Internet. In particular, Congress's handling of the network neutrality issue will determine whether network operators will have the ability to discriminate in their carriage of the data that comprise a major part of society's "central nervous system"--the news and information, emails and websites, that have become a part of everyday life. Instead of the common-carriage, all-data-are-created-equal tradition of the Internet, the new, Un-Neutral Net will allow operators to favor their own content and that of their affiliates, while relegating competitive and unaffiliated content to the slow lanes of the Internet. Network neutrality, it is clear, is more than an idle concern. It is not, as the network owners and their well-paid consultants suggest, a "solution in search of a problem." Rather, the principle of network neutrality represents our last, best hope of preserving a vital noncommercial, civic core in an online environment that grows more commercialized every day. As we have noted elsewhere, the possibilities for democratic discourse, for educational advancement, and for cultural expression will be greatly reduced in a delivery system that favors big business over small, e-commerce over e-democracy, and public relations over public service. Free of such market-based controls, on the other hand, the new broadband networks could bring a vast array of new programming to the home, at once extending the reach of the high-speed Internet (which currently reaches less than half of the nation's households) and enhancing its content (much of which is currently constrained by the bandwidth limitations of inferior broadband service). But for the full potential of the broadband era to be realized, we will need to have a strong policy of network neutrality in place.
http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/UNN.html