Technologists square off on Net neutrality

TECHNOLOGISTS SQUARE OFF ON NET NEUTRALITY
[SOURCE: C-Net|News.com, AUTHOR: Anne Broache]
Two Internet pioneers dueled on Monday over whether proposed Net neutrality regulations supported by companies like Google and Amazon.com are the best way to prevent "abusive" behavior by broadband providers. A debate hosted by the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research institute that brags of challenging "conservative thinking," pitted Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, who co-developed the Internet's backbone protocols and has emerged as a leading proponent of congressional antidiscrimination mandates for network operators, against Dave Farber, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist widely considered to be a "grandfather" of the Internet. The pair of technologists appeared to agree on at least one thing: Network operators, in general, shouldn't be allowed to interfere with Net users' activities. Where they disagreed was on the role that Congress and federal regulators should play in the ongoing debate over so-called Net neutrality, the idea that network operators must generally give equal treatment to all content that travels over their pipes. Without legislation that expressly bars network operators from engaging in such prioritization, start-up Web innovators will suffer and consumers may have to pay higher prices to reach the content they want, Cerf warned. "I am very concerned that we do not have adequate competition today to act as a restraint on abusive practices on some of the broadband carriers," Cerf said, "and until we have that kind of competition, we still need oversight and some kind of constraints."
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