"Internet neutrality" is central to the future of the Internet. The question of whether broadband providers should be free to give priority to traffic from some senders over others took center stage during 2006 in debates on telecommunications legislation.
The Internet to date has been an open platform for speech and innovation, without gatekeepers or central control. There is little doubt that the dramatic and ongoing proliferation of innovative new applications, technologies, and services -- from the very creation of the World Wide Web to the emergence of instant messaging and innovative services like YouTube -- is directly related to the neutral and open characteristics of the platform. These characteristics include nondiscriminatory routing and freedom to create new services at the ends of the network without negotiating with network operators.
At the same time, network operators have legitimate concerns about their own freedom to develop pricing and marketing models. Extensive or burdensome regulation is clearly not desirable. Overbroad rules could interfere with important network management functions like spam filtering. And questions about incentives for network deployment and accommodating high-bandwidth content need to be seriously considered.
Congress Should Preserve the Essential Openness of the Internet: Congress should work to craft specific and targeted legislation to preserve the core elements of the neutral Internet platform. Legislative efforts should focus on the portion of broadband networks dedicated to the Internet and should leave the non-Internet portion alone. Congress should not create a bureaucratic, time-consuming, or otherwise heavy-handed or over-inclusive regulatory scheme. However, it would be inadequate, as was proposed last year, to merely prevent network operators from blocking access entirely to selected sites, services, applications, or devices. The debate also should focus on what types of discriminatory treatment, short of outright blocking, could be harmful and require attention.
CDT Paper, "Preserving the Essential Internet" (June 2006)
Congress Should Monitor Developments in the Broadband Market: In particular, lawmakers should track closely the network capacity devoted to ordinary "neutral" Internet services as opposed to more closed, proprietary services; watch for signs that network providers are giving unfair advantage to their own content, applications, or services; and track factors that might reduce the threat to Internet neutrality, such as increasing competition or jumps in overall network capacity.