Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is a topic of debate and confusion in the United States. It draws supporters as diverse as the Christian Coalition and moveon.org, pits traditional telecommunications companies like Verizon and Comcast against Internet giants such as Yahoo! and Google, and gives politicians yet another platform to raise an ongoing liberal-conservative debate over government regulation. So what is all this talk about? Philosophically, Net Neutrality is an ethical framework to govern access to the Internet. It advocates no restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed. In 2005, the FCC embedded these principles into its policy with an objective to “encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet” (Policy Statement). This statement and proposed additional legislation is the source of continued controversy today. Fundamentally, the debate is grounded in opinions of necessity of Internet regulations and the repercussions of action or inaction. This paper will attempt to provide a context for the debate, a better understanding of the regulation and the possible implications, and a summary of the differing views.
Military, academic and research institutions have been utilizing networked computers since the 1950s, but this network was closed to the general public. All this changed in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee, a British Scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) began promoting the World Wide Web project in an effort to use “Hypertext to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will" (Berners-Lee). The project has grown exponentially into a global phenomenon with an estimated 1.6 billion users worldwide and 231 million in the USA (CIA). To be a part of the World Wide Web the users rely on the services provided by the Internet Service Providers