Net Neutrality is a catch-all phrase that describes how carriers let services run across their networks. Some carriers now have reasons to set and prioritize their own service traffic above those from other services.
The motivation to do this has historical basis, but also runs in the face of many cultural obstacles and even technical problems within the Internet itself. Some say it could even a harbinger of the death of the Internet. This essay goes into the rationale behind Net Neutrality issues-- and its foes.
Background
Once upon a time, there were lots of cooperatives and other companies that provided phone networks to locals. They interconnected across numerous boundaries through a variety of systems, few of which actually were competitors of each other.
The government got involved and The Communications Act of 1935 set out to define numerous boundaries, tenets, and principles of how the US would evolve in its communications infrastructure-- far ahead of services that evolved that could not be foreseen in 1935. It served as a model for the evolution of communications across the world, because the US had the technology leadership at the time to bring products and services to market. It seemed at the time, visionary, and it was.
AT&T, IT&T, GTE, ConTel, and others by the 1960's had bought many small town systems and conglomerated them together. Later, SS7 would be evolved to bring inter-carrier clearances to their calls, so they could get paid.
Digital lines were something different. As the 'last mile' provider, local phone companies were more than happy to run data cabling providing either analog or digital circuits to your business(es) at hideous costs. Using various kinds of signaling methods, you were then cross connected into wide area networks.
Judge Greene broke up AT&T into consituent 'Baby Bells' which have largely reformed now. In the interim, third party companies sprang up, and were able to provide local and even long distance phone services on the very same wires and equipment that AT&T, and its now Baby Bell companies, used to provide telephone services with. It made them HOPPING MAD. The Baby Bells tried as much as possible to competitively thwart these companies, called Tariff 12 carriers.
They also started to offer, on a limited basis, 'digital' line services based on ISDN, which had two 64KB channels + a small channel used for signaling. It was at best, unsuccessful and rather poorly distributed.
Telcos then used a digital transmission method called ATM to bridge together varying systems as a trunking method for both data and voice. They spent billions on ATM. They wasted billions on ATM. In the interim, digital services (DS) circuits became popular.
Digital ServicesThe Internet was designed, like the TCP/IP protocol set it uses, to connect disparate systems together. Somehow, an organization connected to an upstream host, and through routing, made a connection.
Over that connection came mail traffic, or other applications. Uploads, downloads, queries, all sort of traffic went through the Internet. The advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990's showed how graphical material could be requested and presented across product lines and operating system boundaries through browsers.
And like every new hammer sees everything as a nail, browsers and webservers became ways to fill in forms, provide entertainment, as well as serve as the front-ends for many applications.
IsochronicityThese applications weren't sensitive to time. A picture could download and you'd wait for it, just like any thing else on a web page. But to reproduce audio and video, it's necessary to change these 'multimedia data types' in to digital equivalents, then send them across wires to be reassembeled and put back into their analog forms-- through speakers and monitors.
Timing is crucial, as audio and video are sensitive to delays. Audio doesn't need much overall 'wire space' or bandwidth, but video-- especially high definition (HD) video-- does. Without bandwidth and a clear path that isn't otherwise delayed, video over the Internet is limited to small size pictures with slow frame rates and few colors. This is because each of these video qualities-- picture size, frames per second, and color-- all expand the space needed to transmit each second of video.
Two Kinds of TrafficTherefore, the two kinds of traffic are time-dependent, and not time-dependent. Time-dependent applications are popular, however, and the Internet really wasn't designed specifically for them, but can be adapted to accomodate them. Time-dependent applications are audio (such as streaming radio, voice-over-IP/Internet telephony), video (streaming video of varying qualities), and interactive applications such as gaming.
The number of companies that can deliver the Internet to a home or business has climbed meteorically. At first, residential consumers used 'dial-up' connections via phone lines to Internet connection points called Internet Service Providers; AOL was an early leader in this type of connection over phone lines. Others companies joined in, and business connections to the Internet blossomed as well. Telcos, peripherally, made good money by connecting companies together via Internet Network Access Points.
How to Sour ThingsCable companies, looking for expanding revenues, found ways to make TV coax cable carry data-- and therefore make stunningly fast connections (by comparison to all of the offerings that telcos had) to the Internet. By a studious if somewhat haphazard plan, numerous cable companies sewed together an enormous networking infrastructure of residential (and a few commercial) clients. They leapfrogged the telcos, the ISPs, and others by having product at a time when demand was high for better connection speed to the Internet.
Indeed, once you've gotten a fast connection, going slower again becomes difficult to do. And so, cable companies enjoyed a rapid rise in Internet business.
Telcos had been experimenting for some time, in finding ways to convert their copper, twisted-pair phone cable connections to customers into data lines. At first their Digital Subscriber Line methods (DSL) were inhibited by several factors, including things like the distance from a residence or business to a central office or subsidiary connection point. Later, these obstacles would be slowly overcome both in terms of their technical obstacles, but also the obstacles in obtaining the capital needed to deploy connectivity gear. DSL and cable are strong competitors, although cable still leads in terms of desirable speed.
Wireless networks also started to rise, slowly, inhibited by both consumer, service, and equipmente costs, but also by their comparatively slow speeds compared to wired-side networking of any kind.
Three forms of wireless networks emerged: WiFi, which uses localized cells of communications about 100meters in diameter, cellular/mobile data, which uses cells of about 10kilometers (but at a much slower speed) and 'proprietary' wireless networking of variable speeds. Each of these had the ability to connect mobile or fixed location users of the Internet, but at variable speeds at variable costs.
So What About Net Neutrality?Both cable and telco providers have as competition, organizations that would desire to bring consumers and businesses services that occupy wires that they feel they own. These services compete with ones that cable companies and telcos would prefer that you buy directly from them, and not their competition.
Voice-over-Internet-Protocols (VoIP) is just an example, and one that doesn't use very much of the resources that both residences and commercial users pay for. Instead, the problem is with video. Video takes up huge resources. If you buy Internet video from a cable company, they're happy-- but you could also buy them from a competitor. They hate that-- using their wires to buy a competitor's services. AT&T and Verizon, the two dominant telcos in the US, have both announced video services over their infrastructure that competes with cable company services.
And both would rather that you not use VoIP from their competition. Indeed, they'd rather priortize by blocking or diminishing purposefully available resources if you're going to use services that compete with their own products in voice, audio, or video.
This means, if Net Neutrality fails, that you'll be tied to the services provided by whichever connectivity provider you've subscribed to. Others will be blocked, or slowed to the point of unusability. This isn't competition over common carrier wires, this is extortion in its finest form-- in my opinion.
Telcos and cable companies claim that they own their wires and should be able to do with them as they will. I say these are public services transversing public property as utilities. We as consumers deserve choice, and should not be held to fealty to whichever company historically has wires connected to our homes and businesses.
Tell your congressperson. Perhaps they've already been bribed by campaign contributions or other influences brought by the telcos in Washington. Perhaps not. Make your voice heard.