I’ve been dragging my feet but it’s time to catch up on Net Neutrality. Last week,  the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 was introduced in the House and Comcast filed with the FCC defending their policy of purposely slowing down some traffic on its network, including some music and movie downloads to ensure better flow of traffic over its network. (Comcast’s FCC filing was in response to petitions by the consumer group Free Press and the online video provider Vuze, which claimed that the cable company was abusing its control over its network to impede video competition.)

On February 13 Representatives Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, to “establish broadband policy and direct the Federal Communications Commission to conduct a proceeding and public broadband summits to assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues relating to broadband Internet access services, and for other purposes.”

For a librarian, I don’t actually have strong feelings on Net Neutrality. I can see both sides. From the consumer end of course, I think we should all have access to information equally. But I don’t know that we have it now. Right now some companies can pay the big bucks to advertise all over the Internet or hire people to help them do well with search engines – and some can’t. Some neighbors hog bandwidth and slow us all down. (More with some technologies than others, clearly.) Now prioritizing traffic might add yet another barrier – but it’s not the first barrier to information. That leads me to think – if companies such as search engines and content providers (web site owners) can profit from diverting traffic to a site, shouldn’t the ISPs (be it wireless, fiber, cable, copper…) be able to capitalize on it too? After all they are the ones who keep the lines working; that requires large investments. (And wouldn’t we like to encourage more investment?)

Mostly I feel like we’re rearranging the chairs on the Titanic when possibly a better answer is to overpower the problem with a lot more bandwidth.

So there’s my wishy-washy two cents on the matter. Here is what some smarter (or at least more decisive) people are saying. I’m going to assume that most people reading this know the issue. (If not you can check out Wikipedia’s definition.) I’ve tried to distill the notes as much as possible so the quotes below and really paraphrased quotes. Continue reading →