From STEVE ALEXANDER, Star Tribune
Julius Genachowski, with the support of several Internet advocacy groups, has backed net neutrality as a way to prevent the telephone and cable TV firms, who are big Internet service providers, from favoring some Internet content or services over others.
“Users, not Internet service providers, need to decide what services get on the Internet,” Genachowski told the Broadband Summit at the U’s Carlson School of Management. “The Internet’s open architecture encouraged investment, innovation and access to information and ideas. That’s very important, and we should continue that.”
If you have been following this battle, you would know that Google, Verizon, and most of the large ISPs are against net neutrality. There is a lot of money at stake. Controlling content is big money for ISP’s and network providers. For example, without net neutrality, a company like Verizon could restrict searches on their network to only Google and Yahoo, monopolizing their revenue streams. If you want to use MSN, to bad. Would they do this? It is hard to say since the consumer would demand net neutrality and there would be a lot of push back on something that extreme.
The biggest challenge to net neutrality in recent months is access to bandwidth. Gamers, large peer to peer networks, and soon to be more and more HD video streaming require tremendous bandwidth and network needs. The large ISPs want to restrict access or slow down access to sites with such content as the network demand is costly and the large needs of a few hurt the many.
For the consumer, what net neutrality means is no restrictions imposed on; content, sites, platforms, kinds of equipment to connect, and modes of communication, by government, companies, or any other entity.
It sounds simple and a basic but there are valid arguments on both sides. Internet access should be unrestricted, but who pays for extreme bandwidth users? If you allow limits and restriction, how do you prevent abuse like filtering content of sites that can’t pay for preferred access? Constructing a policy around this will be a difficult battle for either side you sit on, but plan for something to happen as bandwidth and telecom needs keep increasing with new technology.
