Silicon.com reports on a presentation given by Tim Berners-Lee in Edinburgh yesterday putting his support behind the movement to maintain the concept of “Net Neutrality”.
Net Neutrality describes the current status quo where all network traffic is equal in the eyes of the providers of network infrastructure, e.g your network packet containing email to granny is the same as a packet containing some video from youtube.com.
The network providers, in the US in particular, want to change this and charge a premium for particular content, as a way of potentially reducing plague of p2p traffic you might look at this, but the reality is these guys just want to get paid twice.
I hate to say this but this may be a difficult battle to fight, the idea of value based pricing of infrastructure is well established in other areas, your car tax is much less than that of a 30 tonne truck…
however we really must try all we can to protect the pricing model of today, unlike the physical world there is no actual difference between network traffic containing different content, unfortunately lawmakers seem to have great difficulty understanding the world of bits rather than atoms !
