The Department of Justice Says "Trust Us" when it Comes to Net Neutrality

The debate over net neutrality has been around for a while. The term net nuetrality, according to Wikipedia refers to a principle that applies to residential broadband networks and potentially to all networks. Although there is no exact definition for the term net neutrality, broadband networks that operated on this principles would be free of restrictions on the types of devices that can be used to comprise the network itself.

The Department of Justice recently filed a suit with the FCC arguing against net neutrality with an attitude that the Ars Technica site describes only as "trust us." Advocates of the model are concerned that placing regulations on it would allow current companies such as those engaged in telecommunications services would push out competing protocols and technologies and the communications especially would start to force the tiered model currently favored by them upon consumers.

The Ars Technica's writers called the DoJ's arguments "weak and surprisingly lacking in substance." For its part, the DoJ said that regulations on the matter were not necessary and if anti-trust violation should creep up they should be allowed to step into handle it.

ISPs charging more for different amounts of bandwidth is already standard and many people have their sites hosted on a commercial provider such as Yahoo or Godaddy pay for a certain amount of bandwidth they get to use per month.

Much of the debate arises over what exactly proponents and critics mean when they use the phrase net neutrality and what practices need to be prohibited. The idea is only a few years old and first appeared in the late 1990s. The concern is that the new regulations or lack thereof, whatever that my mean might provide a variety of middlemen that need to be paid to get to a website. Currently, companies and others pay just to access the Internet itself. For high speed there are only really two viable options for most consumers - DSL or cable. (A few may be able to use satellite for high speed Internet but this option is currently expensive) and a few may be stuck on dial up depending on the area in which they find themselves.

Until exactly what Net neutrality is, which seems to be not charging people for the data that goes through the network on the way to its final destination, the debate is not likely to be resolved.

Sources:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070906-doj-argues-against-net-neutrality-in-fcc-filing-says-trust-us.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality