Internet « John Wright | Software Developer | Los Angeles

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[This article ponders just a small bit of the pros and cons concerning Net Neutrality. Understand that I'm absolutely pro Net Neutrality as a policy, but I'm a bit divided on whether or not government should impose regulations to protect Net Neutrality. In the end, it seems like government regulations may be absolutely necessary to protect Net Neutrality, but whether the government will decide to regulate is another issue. Considering all this, Net Neutrality could be a potentially sticky issue for some time to come.]

My simple definition of Net Neutrality is…

“ISPs don’t touch the bits and bytes flowing through their pipes”

In other words, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remain neutral concerning what internet traffic flows through their networks (or their “pipes”). ISPs just provide dumb pipes for the traffic to flow through. They remain neutral by not actively doing anything to the traffic, like filtering it or blocking it in any way. This is the way the internet has operated since it’s beginning (for the most part).

An example where an ISP acted in a non neutral way is when Comcast actively blocked BitTorrent traffic on its networks. In many ways, this is a fairly small thing they did. All paying customers of Comcast who did not use BitTorrent didn’t notice a thing. Comcast+BitTorrent users on the other hand, we’re stuck and would have been forced to switch ISPs in order to continue using BitTorrent, had the FCC not intervened.
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