About Network Neutrality By: Jim Church, Collin Burger, Jason Paul, and Yu Sun Jung

What is “Net Neutrality”? Why is it important? Free and Open Internet Corporate discrimination Massive growth of WWW

Development of technology and services

Supporters of the Concept Organizations that support network neutrality include: Moveon.org Consumer Federation of America AARP American Library Association Gun Owners of America Public Knowledge the Media Access Project the Christian Coalition TechNet Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) has also spoken out in favor of net neutrality.

Opposition to the Concept The free-market advocacy organizations FreedomWorks Foundation, National Black Chamber of Commerce, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Progress and Freedom Foundation, high-tech trade groups (such as the National Association of Manufacturers), and others oppose network neutrality.

Associated Legal & Corporate Issues While various pieces of legislation have been proposed, nothing has received enough support to be made law. Telecom companies like AT&T and Time Warner have tried various pricing strategies based on bandwidth consumption however, none have met with success, either ending in public outcry, or a ruling by the FCC.

Differing Perspectives Some companies which own the networks want to inhibit P2P activity, claiming it slows their whole network and is primarily used for illegal purposes. The most extreme proposals from such companies suggest varying payment plans which provide limited to complete access of the internet.

Differing Perspectives These proposals by companies are often proposed in a profit seeking capitalist context. Proponents of Net Neutrality counter that they don’t expect access to the internet to be free, but that freedom of conduct and quality of the internet are integral to preserving the integrity of the internet.

Differing Perspectives Could any control at all lead to censorship?

Social Issues with Network Neutrality 1. End to end principle: the principle that communications protocol operations should be defined to occur at the end- points of a communication system. 2. Data discrimination: a claim that the current internet is not neutral as its implementation of best effort generally favors file transfer and other non-time sensitive traffic over real-time communications.

Social Issues with Network Neutrality 3. Quality of service: There is no single, uniform method of interconnecting network using IP, and not all networks that use IP are part of the internet. Thus IPTV networks such as AT&T’s U-Verse service are isolated from the Internet, and are therefore not covered by network neutrality agreements. 4. Over provisioning. 5. Peer-to-peer file sharing. 6. Pricing models.