Network neutrality began in the late 1990s, when the Internet was beginning to go beyond the web site medium. The World Wide Web has become much more than a means to deliver websites: online games, music, movies, and Voice over IP (VOIP) has made the Internet much more versatile and rich.
Internet service providers, which often double as deliverers of other telecommunications, such as telephone and cellphone services, saw this trend as a threat to their business in two different ways. First, VOIP can be a perfect substitute for a phone, and those who use it only pay for the flat rate ISPs charge. Second, the use of games, music, and movies was increasing the demand for bandwidth, which ISPs must provide.
The providers responded by beginning to restrict their consumers of what they can use the Internet for. Many barred the use of VOIP, and restricted the downloads of rich-media. Also, in addition to these new and more bandwidth intensive protocols, multiple people were connecting to the same modem via a hub or router, and many ISPs also banned the implementation of Virtual Private Networks in their consumers' homes.
Consumers fought back and won back "control of the Internet" after congress passed into law a series of bills that allowed consumers to use the Internet for any legal use, and that ISPs, with few exceptions, could not forcibly restrict access to data in any form to its consumers.
Network neutrality has become an important issue again, after August 5th, 2005, when the Federal Communications Commission declared that DSL services were Information Services, rather than telecommunications services. Network Neutrality, therefore, may no longer protect those using DSL.
Furthermore, there have been talks of DSL providers instituting what can be called a "multi-tier" system, which means some content providers (i.e. websites) are given preferrential treatment to other content providers, depending on how much they pay the ISP to "use their system." In other words, the websites that do not pay these ISPs a premium to use their faster service will load slower and be treated with less importance than those websites that do pay the premium.
DefendNetNeutrality.org and other organizations oppose this multi-tier network because it will completely change the Internet as we know it from a very open, independent medium, to a more classified medium that only large corporations could fully take advantage of. At this point, any website, that passes through an ISP holds the same imporance and will be served to the consumer as any other website. A multi-tier network will only bring giant websites that can afford the premiums at a rapid pace.
Several Internet companies and organizations have actively supported Network Neutrality, which will preserve the Internet's open nature. Major websites such as Google, Yahoo, and eBay have each voiced strong opposition to changing the Internet to a multi-tier network. Software giants such as Microsoft have also opposed the changes proposed by Internet Service Providers.
At this point, besides the US Chamber of Commerce, who has opposed Net Neutrality, no senator or congressman in Washington has expressed support or opposition to Network Neutrality, but many of the citizens that support Net Neutrality fear that the ISP giants will speak their point of view with contributions to their campaign, and that, before we know it, congress will strike down net neutrality, and give the ISPs the authority to implement the multi-tier network.
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