Net neutrality

I'm going to write here the shortest primer of Net Nutrality ever:

Net Neutrality people think you should pay for an ammount of bandwidth and the more bandwith you buy the more you can use, but it doesn't matter what you use.

Anti-Net Nutrality people (generally telcos) think you should pay more to make a phone call over the internet or watch a movie than the rest of the stuff you do because they use more bandwidth everywhere in the network - and they want to be able to send you a bill at the end of the month rather than a flat rate that you pay now.

There has been a lot of mindless back and forth about this issue, but now after you have read this primer you are ready to appreciate the best e-mail ever written on the subject. It was sent to The Register and was written in Comic Sans font but read it and tell me the guy doesn't have the point pretty nailed down, taking as he does the view that you'll be buying from the telcos the right to get your video and telephone at a priority over the rest of the traffic.

Take it away Arah Leonard:

VoIP and Video over IP can go to hell.

Should the anti-neutrality side win, the World Wide Web will be slowed to a crawl and be much more likely to fall apart, even while the internet as a protocol survives. As the VoIP and IPTV flood the network with far more data than it was ever conceived of transporting these services will be boosted in priority while the actual World Wide Web gets downgraded into infamy.

And for what? Cheaper telephones and TV? Telephone services that don't use the internet already exist. They have their own lines. We don't need VoIP to run a telephone. It's only a new fad. Cable and satellite servies already exist. As do local channels on the regular airwaves. They also have their own data lines. We don't need IPTV to run a television. It's an even newer fad. But there's only one World Wide Web, and there is no other service that can provide for it. The internet is the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is the internet. So if we destroy the World Wide Web just to create cheaper alternatives to telephone and television, what have we actually accomplished?

Net neutrality - the great debacle | The Register