The changing internet

You've probably heard a bit about the ongoing net neutrality debate; it's not over, but the concept of net neutrality took a blow yesterday when a Senate committee rejected a proposal to include language requiring it in a telecommunications bill.

So what's this all about?

I'm not going to try to explain the entire arguments for and against net neutrality. But here's a brief explanation and some links.

There's an old and established idea in telecommunications called "common carriage" that's formed our sense of how telecom services work: the idea that telecoms are providing a highway (to use the most obvious analogy) on which traffic travels - phone calls and now data. They build the highway, we pay them to use it (by placing a call or by transmitting data). We can pay to have a simple low-tech access "ramp" (such as POTS, or "plain old telephone service"), or we can pay for more: from DSL to a T1. Once our traffic enters that highway, it's all handled the same way.

Network operators (the big telecoms like AT&T and Verizon and cable operators like Time Warner and Comcast) would like to change that. They would like to be able to offer premium services - so, for example, if Google wants to make a deal with them, they can have their traffic travel on newer, faster networks while my data keeps plugging along on slower routes.

At first glance, this doesn't seem like a crazy idea - if a company is willing to pay for their own special "fast lane," why shouldn't they be able to? That's a free market at work, right?

The problem is that we are talking about a market that's controlled by an oligopoly of a handful of network providers, with extremely high entry costs that make it essentially impossible for anyone else to enter it.

If you haven't been following the debate closely, here are some places where you can get both sides of the argument:

Vint Cerf, one of the people who helped design and build the internet

Contined