As you may know from reading this site over the years, I am a fervent supporter of ‘net neutrality’ regulations. In fact, I think that the principles of net neutrality should be codified in federal law—but I’ll take a firmly established Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulation as a fine stop-gap.
To oversimplify the issue, net neutrality means that the various Internet service providers (‘ISPs’ like Verizon, Comcast, Cox Cable, etc.) should not be permitted to discriminate between different bits of data on their network. The service providers should be neutral. From the foundation of the Internet, each bit and byte moving over the network has been treated equally—whether it be part of an email, a web site, an image, a newsgroup posting, an instant message, a video, a song, a piece of software, etc. Some service providers, however, want to have the ability to give preferential treatment (for their own business purposes) to some bits and bytes over others.
Many justify this on the basis of network strain. Videos, for example, tax the Internet infrastructure much worse than a regular web site, so ISPs might want to limit the usage of video on the web. There is a fair case to be made for this kind of discrimination, to a point, however there are several documented cases of ISPs—many of which are also phone companies—attempting to block traffic for Voice Over IP (VOIP) companies like Vonage that compete with their own land-line phone services. If we give ISPs the authority to decide which traffic moves over their networks, we run a very real risk of turning the Internet into a giant toll road that benefits ISPs at our expense.