The notion that the Internet should be a single, free, and open network space, with all access providers treating every data packet the same way--without preference or special treatment based on content or origin.
AOL struggles mightily with spam email. It has millions of subscribers who receive hundreds of millions of spam emails per week. At enormous cost, AOL (and every other provider of email service) has to try to filter out this dreck.
A core problem is that the cost of sending email is very low. It's easy to buy a server that can pump out millions of emails per day, and the service providers have to receive that email and deliver it to their users. It uses a significant percentage of the available bandwidth on the Internet.
Garth Graham is the visionary leader behind Telecommunities Canada; Graham has been thinking about communities and technology longer and with more clarity than most of us, and when Garth talks, I try to shut up and listen. In the hallway between PCNA sessions, I made a casual statement about how "technology is a tool." It's an innocuous phrase that has been uttered by millions of technocrats at one time or another.
Stephen Levy is a knowledgeable technology columnist for Newsweek, and his article on network neutrality is short and articulates the issues clearly. As Levy puts it, the Internet may end up with two classes of service: "steerage and first class," with nothing in between.
I've borrowed the title of Jeff Chester's article in The Nation. Chester raises alarm bells about the plans of the incumbent broadband providers to create walled gardens that give them near monopoly control over what their subscribers can do and access via their broadband connections.
