About Network Neutrality
By: Jim Church, Collin Burger, Jason Paul, and Yu Sun Jung
What is “Net Neutrality”?
Why is it important?
 Free and Open Internet
 Corporate discrimination
 Massive growth of WWW
 Development of technology and services
Supporters of the Concept
 Organizations that support network neutrality include:
 Moveon.org
 Consumer Federation of America
 AARP
 American Library Association
 Gun Owners of America
 Public Knowledge
 the Media Access Project
 the Christian Coalition
 TechNet
 Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) has also
spoken out in favor of net neutrality.
Opposition to the Concept
 The free-market advocacy organizations FreedomWorks
Foundation, National Black Chamber of Commerce, the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Progress and
Freedom Foundation, high-tech trade groups (such as the
National Association of Manufacturers), and others oppose
network neutrality.
Associated Legal & Corporate Issues
 While various pieces of legislation have
been proposed, nothing has received
enough support to be made law.
 Telecom companies like AT&T and Time
Warner have tried various pricing
strategies based on bandwidth
consumption however, none have met
with success, either ending in public
outcry, or a ruling by the FCC.
Differing Perspectives
 Some companies which own the
networks want to inhibit P2P
activity, claiming it slows their
whole network and is primarily
used for illegal purposes.
 The most extreme proposals from
such companies suggest varying
payment plans which provide
limited to complete access of the
internet.
Differing Perspectives
 These proposals by companies are often proposed in a
profit seeking capitalist context.
 Proponents of Net Neutrality counter that they don’t expect
access to the internet to be free, but that freedom of conduct
and quality of the internet are integral to preserving the
integrity of the internet.
Differing Perspectives
Could any control at all lead to censorship?
Social Issues with Network Neutrality
1. End to end principle: the principle that communications
protocol operations should be defined to occur at the endpoints of a communication system.
2. Data discrimination: a claim that the current internet is not
neutral as its implementation of best effort generally favors file
transfer and other non-time sensitive traffic over real-time
communications.
Social Issues with Network Neutrality
3. Quality of service: There is no single, uniform method of
interconnecting network using IP, and not all networks that use
IP are part of the internet. Thus IPTV networks such as
AT&T’s U-Verse service are isolated from the Internet, and are
therefore not covered by network neutrality agreements.
4. Over provisioning.
5. Peer-to-peer file sharing.
6. Pricing models.