net neutrality

No less than the open freedom of the Internet is at stake in the war over net neutrality. Now FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has waded into the fray with two new proposals and a clear message: an open and nondiscriminatory Internet is a must for the future.

That stance emerged today in Genachowski's address at the Brookings Institute in Washington. He laid out problems such as the limited competition among ISPs, the economic incentives for ISPs to sell bundled phone and TV service with Internet, and the burden of growing Internet traffic that puts pressure back on ISPs.

When DSL and cable first arrived, ISPs abandoned the per-hour dial-up access billing model for unlimited bandwidth at a flat rate fee. Recently, Comcast has come under fire for shaping its traffic (read: blocking) while maintaining its unlimited contract with users. Lawsuits have been threatened and the FCC has been stirred to comment. The issue at hand is the peer-to-peer file sharing networks. While their user bases account for a very small percentage of the total Internet audience, the traffic they generate is said to account for anywhere between 50 and 90 percent of all data.