Net Neutrality.

In the United States on April 6th 2010 the District of Columbia Appeals Court ruled on case brought by Comcast, an Internet Service Provider (ISP), against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Although the case was won by Comcast on a narrow and technical point of law regarding the FCC's jurisdiction the purpose of the case was to bring an end to something called Net Neutrality.

As one of the founding principles of the Internet, put simply, Net Neutrality states that ISP's must treat all data on the Internet equally and move it around at the same speed regardless of what it is or where it has come from. This gives Internet users the freedom to go and look at what they want when they want by forcing the ISP's to act sort of like a taxi driver who has to take a customer to the door of their destination. The ISP's hate this because it would be much more profitable for them to act more like bus drivers. That is to say rather then letting the customer choose exactly where they want to go the ISP's would set up fixed routes to certain websites and only allow the customer to travel along those fixed routes. Obviously this also gives the ISP's huge control over what sites their customers can visit on the Internet turning the ISP's into de facto Internet censors. Under those circumstances it is easy to imagine a world where the customers of one ISP would be banned from visiting websites that tell them just how much they're being overcharged by their ISP.

This distorted Internet model has actually been attempted before. Back in the 1990's when the Internet was just starting to emerge as a consumer technology AOL set up their ISP operation. The main difference between AOL's service and the Internet as we know it today is that AOL didn't actually allow their customers to log onto actual websites. Instead they logged onto the AOL website and AOL website then went out into the Internet and brought back, to the customer, websites that AOL approved of. Using the "AOL Keyword" system a clear preference was given to web pages that promoted products made by AOL Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate ever created that at the time seemed to be on a mission to own everything.

Very few people were prepared to pay to access the Internet like this so the expansion of the Internet was painfully slow and the technology was almost lost to consumers. Fortunately people soon learned that by using very simple computer programming (i.e typing in http://www. theweb-address.com) they were able to access any website they wanted regardless of whether it suited AOL's corporate interests or not. As a result AOL's service quickly became known as "The Internet for people who are too stupid to use the Internet!" and Time Warner dumped the AOL part of their business in 2009.

More importantly this shift in the Internet market model led to the creation of search engines like Google and Yahoo and saw the Internet explode into the vast library of news sites, online retailers, technical information, social networking sites, video on demand sites and online music services that it is today. In short the Free Market was given a choice on the shape of the Internet and the Free Market chose Net Neutrality.

As Net Neutrality increases competition and drives down prices it hurts the profits of the ISP's. Therefore they despise it and have promised a marathon of litigation to do away with it. This would allow them to vary the speed at which data moves around the Internet meaning that some websites would load faster then others and access to some sites would be blocked entirely. As a result the ISP's would be able to change the way that customers pay to access the Internet and make it more like the way that customers pay to access Pay (cable/satellite) TV services. That would mean that rather then paying for a fixed amount of bandwidth that can be used as the customer wants, as it is now, Internet users would be forced to pay for Internet service packages. So for example you could pay for a basic packages that gives you access to a couple of news sites along with an email account and a less then good social networking site run by the ISP. Or you could pay a bit more for a Sports package that would give you access to sports websites that over the next couple of years will start showing events live. Or you could get the researchers package, the movies package or the music lovers package and so on.

Obviously this creates the problem for Internet users that Pay TV users already suffer from; If you don't have the right package you don't get to access the content. That will totally crush competition on the Internet and will drive up prices as the content generators (Amazon, the BBC, iTunes, Facebook etc) are forced to pay the ISP's potentially huge fees to be included in their service packages.

So in conclusion while the FCC might not be the right body to regulate the Internet but Net Neutrality and the Free Market it creates need to be protected even if it has to be enshrined in law.